AFRL Phillips Research Site Wins ServiceNow Mission Support Team of the Year Award

SMS Contractors on this team: Michael R. Richardson, Tristan A. Price, Francisco J. Dominicci-Aponte, Nicholas A. Schrandt.

The AFRL/RVIS ServiceNow development team was lauded by the ServiceNow industry partner as being the most technically competent team in both the Air and Space Force. Their expertise in this platform resulted in a subject matter expert for AFRL to turn to for workflow and architecture implementation across the Enterprise. They integrated the Continuous Improvement and Innovation team into workflow development requiring all current and new processes to first go through a rigorous review to streamline before digitizing, which resulted in tightly coupled teaming between RVIS and continuous improvement resulting in an average of 30% reduction of steps per workflow.

The team overhauled the Logistics Material Control Activity process for accounting for computer assets in a digital environment. They moved all Information Technology assets into ServiceNow providing a transparent, readily available workflow to turn in, transfer, hand receipt and account for all Information Technology Equipment assets in both RD/RV. This enabled customers a true one stop shop for computer issues, including transferring a new computer to the user on demand while current system is being repaired. Their accomplishments are expected to cut lost Information Technology Equipment by $400K and customer downtime by 86% in many instances.

The development team created a more robust communication venue for the helpdesk interactions with the customer. They added the capability to receive emails from the customer that ingests directly into ServiceNow automatically creating a helpdesk ticket for routing, introduced a helpdesk live chat function allowing customer to chat with an agent on demand, piloted a new workspace feature allowing access to all information on a single page, and improved efficiency of helping the customer by 74%, dropping time to resolution from 15 minutes to 4 minutes.

They wrangled the dreaded in processing process at the Phillips Research Site. Taking what was once an arduous drawn-out process taking weeks to complete, the team made it a digital wonderland taking only 3 days by running parallel activities across both Directorates consolidating over 11 different processes for one individual to complete. This allowed long distant remote employees or even teleworking employees to in-process remotely through the Air Force and Defense Research and Engineering Virtual Private Network by integrating 4 different video repositories, detailed maps and instructions to further integrate and provide training to the new employee as they on board. 

Finally, the development team wrote a proposal and received approval for modeling all existing and future workflows into a comprehensive modeling tool (MagicDraw/Cameo). This new tool will show all flows, interdependencies and possible issues as the Phillips Research Site digitizes future workflows moving to a largely digital support environment where managing these interactions between flows would be impossible without the forethought to provide this modeling.