ServiceNow: Technology Workflow Solution

Improved technology workflow solution helped connect businesses to $95 billion in COVID-19 government aid.

Like many businesses around the world, The Canadian Chamber of Commerce was unprepared for the impacts of a global pandemic. With staff shifting to remote working almost overnight, the country’s largest business association also contended with skyrocketing call volumes as thousands of Canadian entrepreneurs reached out in need of financial support.   

The Canadian Chamber was looking to connect Canadian business owners with the information they needed to access available government resources. However, their telecommunications and IT infrastructure was not equipped to manage this sudden rush of activity. The Canadian Chamber worked with EY Canada on a strategy to leverage digital technology to support their staff and clients. By tapping into ServiceNow, a workflow solution for businesses that uses automation and cloud technology, EY Canada quickly created a service hub called the Business Resilience Service (BRS) to connect business owners to urgently needed financial support.

The Canadian Chamber was looking to connect Canadian business owners with the information they needed to access available government resources. However, their telecommunications and IT infrastructure was not equipped to manage this sudden rush of activity. The Canadian Chamber worked with EY Canada on a strategy to leverage digital technology to support their staff and clients. By tapping into ServiceNow, a workflow solution for businesses that uses automation and cloud technology, EY Canada quickly created a service hub called the Business Resilience Service (BRS) to connect business owners to urgently needed financial support.

“When we looked at what other companies were doing, like pivoting their production to make PPE, we thought EY could bring the accounting world together and provide a financial respirator for small to medium sized businesses as they tried to navigate new government funding programs available,” says Warren Tomlin, EY Ottawa Office Managing Partner and Digital and Innovation Leader at EY Canada. 

EY Canada brought together over 150 chartered accountants from coast to coast via ServiceNow — the tech that powered BRS and delivered a powerful resource-management service. Through the platform, thousands of Canadian business owners spoke with accounting experts and business advisors, free of charge.

Together, entrepreneurs and the Canadian Chamber team were able to identify relevant government relief programs for each entrepreneur based on eligibility, to help design business recovery roadmaps.   

Biren Agnihotri, Digital and Emerging Technology Leader at EY Canada, worked with the Canadian Chamber to improve its digital capacity. Like many teams, the Canadian Chamber was fighting pandemic challenges with an outdated system. “There’s still a lot of manual paperwork floating around, or redundant, trivial processes that lack standardization,” Agnihotri says.

“Another common issue we see across large organizations is that different teams are still operating in silos. Poor visibility into what colleagues in other departments and management are doing leads to a lack of productivity in today’s virtual environment.”

With BRS, the challenge was developing a system that could support a busy hotline, allow for the strategic use of data and quickly connect business owners with vital information. Through the ServiceNow platform, 150 business advisors spent 77,000 minutes on the phone with entrepreneurs during the four-week program while working remotely themselves. The advisors could access and store information through a single platform instead of hopping across multiple applications to find and log information during service delivery. 

“For a long time, the world has run off Excel and email, and that has led to a lot of manual intervention, data entry problems and a general sense of inefficiency. Digitalization of workflows has been key to jumpstarting change for many workplaces,” says Steven Kiss, ServiceNow Canadian Practice Leader at EY Canada.

Because so many relief programs were designed to help hard-hit demographics—including diverse business owners and entrepreneurs—BRS presented a unique opportunity to tailor services to support those most impacted. Not only was the data collected from calls stored for reporting purposes, but it was actively analyzed to fuel new iterations of services provided.

“The insights and data that we could give back to government teams turned into valuable feedback on the programs themselves,” says Tomlin.

“We gave weekly insights in the form of a report, with information like service user demographics. Because policy was unfolding in real time, having a pipeline of feedback in real time was incredibly valuable.” 

Embracing digital collaboration

In the end, BRS connected 4,400 business owners with $95 billion in government aid. This victory is proof that it’s possible for large organizations to quickly integrate new technology and reimagine the way they work.   

On the heels of the successful BRS launch and in anticipation of the digital transformation on the horizon for many industries, EY Canada officially welcomed ServiceNow specialists SuMO IT Solutions to the firm in May. With this acquisition, EY Canada is primed to support organizations looking to future-proof their businesses for the digital era.   

“Managing back to work activities requires balancing risk management, HR and legal, supported by IT and facilities. There’s no greater collaboration between departments that are typically siloed,” says Kiss.

“The power of EY Canada and SuMO together is in our ability to work strategically with clients to satisfy the demand for operational efficiency. Less manual oversight is imperative in these cases so that teams can focus more on strategy and less on mundane tasks.”    

The pandemic has proven that business success hinges on embracing digitalization. The journey will be longer for some than others, but EY Canada is ready to meet businesses where they’re at and to map a path into the digital future.

This story was created by Nicole Edwards, Content Works, Postmedia’s commercial content studio, on behalf of Ernst & Young Canada.