When the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) reached out to NuAxis about improving their IT micro purchase request process, NuAxis employees Dave Marshall and Casey Barela responded enthusiastically, because Marshall and Barela understood that providing an exceptional customer experience meant going above and beyond their contractual obligations to ease their customer’s pain points.
Many traditional IT purchase processes are primarily conducted via email, which leaves them open to potential delays and mistakes. Employees must email their manager with a request, and the process continues until the branch chief approves the request, at which time the IT team can begin to process the request.
The potential delays during this process can leave an employee who has submitted a request with no insight into the status of his or her request or when he or she might receive the equipment they need. The NuAxis team envisioned a new, streamlined, and automated process that would alleviate the pain points of a traditional IT purchase request system by simplifying the approval process for managers and providing employees with transparency into the status of their requests.
First, Barela and his team looked at which aspects of the current process BSEE representatives liked and disliked. Then, they worked with their customers at BSEE to gain a deep understanding what the customer wanted to experience when interacting with their new process. After assessing their customer’s needs in detail, Barela and his team developed the solution of a completely automated approval workflow for IT equipment requests through ServiceNow.
The solution enabled employees to simply log onto the Self-Service Portal and fill out an IT micro purchase request form. After the request form has been submitted, it is automatically sent to the employee’s manager for approval. All the manager has to do is click a button to approve and the request is automatically sent to the branch chief for approval. Each time the request is approved, the requesting employee receives an email with an update on the status of his or her request. By implementing the process into Service now, it streamlined the BSEE IT micro purchase request process and reduced delays experienced during the approval phase of the process. Employees were also afforded the ability to easily track the status of their requests in ServiceNow.
During the implementation of the new purchase request process in ServiceNow, Barela and his team concentrated on the customer’s preferences and feedback to ensure that the solution catered to each customer’s unique needs. The team wanted to provide their customers at BSEE with an experience that would make submitting a purchase request in Service Now seamless. In his meetings with BSEE representatives, Barela walked them through the new purchase process step by step, seeking their input on everything from the text on the site to the approval workflow. The representatives from BSEE were grateful that they were afforded this input and visibility into the creation of the system. They were pleased they were able to build a custom workflow system designed around the nuanced needs of their organization. They were also impressed at the thought and care that Barela and his team put into creating a system that is not only easy and intuitive for BSEE employees to use, but also provides the employees at their organization with a simple, fast, and efficient way to access the equipment they need to succeed in their jobs.
After reviewing the new process in ServiceNow, BSEE leadership hailed the system as a huge achievement. Several BSEE employees had already successfully used the system to submit requests for new equipment. In a routine follow-up with BSEE representatives, Dave Marshall received overwhelmingly enthusiastic feedback on the new process from his colleagues at BSEE. The leadership team at BSEE is excited for the organization’s employees to be able to easily request and access the technology they need to perform to the best of their ability. The new IT micro purchase request system is expected to ease the BSEE employee’s experience in requesting and receiving the equipment they need, an issue that has plagued many Federal agencies since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting transition to remote work. As Federal agencies navigate the unprecedented work challenges presented by the pandemic, NuAxis employees continue to go above and beyond the call of duty and take personal responsibility to assist and support their customers in any way they are able.
