About Bayer
Bayer is a global pharmaceutical enterprise with core competencies in the Life Science fields of healthcare and agriculture. Their goal is to create products that contribute to the health of people and plants.
Bayer’s main integration challenges
Driven by the desire to refocus on their core business by allowing their IT personnel to be freed from serving their infrastructure, Bayer launched an outsourcing program to run the IT for their global operations.
Not only were Bayer outsourcing their IT, they were redesigning their entire IT service delivery, and in turn flipping their current integration landscape upside down.
As Bayer’s Service Integration Project Lead, Marco Peetz, put it: “We are a life science company, not an IT technology company – and that’s what we want to focus on.”
The contract, which began on January 1 2020, commenced with one of the program’s suppliers Capgemini, partnering with us at ONEiO to lead the integration of Bayer’s entire supplier ecosystem.
Why did they choose ONEiO?
Bayer’s new approach to Service Integration was guided by the principle that each of the to-be-selected outsourcing partners should be able to work within their own processes, toolsets, and system environments. This required a solution that would bring them all in one integrated setup.
That solution, you ask?
Enabling multi-vendor orchestration is one of ONEiO’s core solutions — empowering people, teams and companies to collaborate the way they want, using the tools they work best in.
So after one supplier recommended ONEiO, Bayer did some initial research and utilized the ONEiO trial to further examine the platform. In the end, the ONEiO platform delivered on its promises, and Bayer chose ONEiO for two main reasons:
Pre-defined endpoint types for ITSM tools
“This flexibility provides us the opportunity to quickly connect our ServiceNow environment with the IT Service Management systems of our strategic partners, regardless what kind of system they use.”
The spirit and culture of ONEiO
“The second one was the spirit of the company. ONEiO proved over the last couple of months that they always play with open cards, and this was visible during our early discussions when we started with a small proof of concept with approximately 3 to 5 adaptors. This is where we could see how passionate ONEiO was in delivering their services. That really convinced us.”
In summary: Bayer were convinced by the speed of implementation and the passion in the work we delivered.
How we solved their integration challenges
The target for the 6-month project was clearly described as a “workable ecosystem”, where providers should work independently from each other and exchange transactional data like incidents or requests seamlessly across their systems.
With such hefty goals and a challenging timeline, how did we make it happen?
After a proof of concept of 3-5 key endpoints, work quickly began on building Bayer’s IT ecosystem.
However, as the project progressed, the complexity of the project increased as new instances were needed to be incorporated.
Bayer decided they wanted a green field instance that was being built for the service integration part of the provider ecosystem. With that in mind, they were facing a challenge: they needed to synchronize the current productive instance with the greenfield instance.
Without ONEiO, this task would likely have been a large project spanning several months.
With ONEiO, Bayer was able to achieve synchronization of incidents, problems, and change requests between the existing and greenfield ServiceNow instances within 1 to 2 weeks.
Bayer also easily integrated a legacy Remedy system, to ensure that legacy services could also be integrated into the future mode of operation. In the end, the integration of the legacy Remedy solution happened through the existing and greenfield ServiceNow instances to an actual provider instance.
The best things about working with ONEiO
When Bayer set out to enact their plan to undertake such a large project, they did so with the hope they would be able to refocus on their core business by allowing the IT personnel to be freed from serving their infrastructure and get back to focus on their life sciences business.
Tobias Lemburg, Solution Architect, ITSM for Bayer, had a few things to say about working with ONEiO. His comments revolved around 4 key benefits:
Less people working on Bayer’s ServiceNow instance
“One of the benefits is that we need to have less people working in our own ServiceNow instance, since our providers use their own ITSM systems. Besides that, it feels as if the people were still actually working in our ServiceNow instance, which is a good thing. We are sure that we can work this way, and we don’t need to have the fear that something is not doable or achievable as it was before.”
The cloud-based architecture of ONEiO
“Just in general the overall architecture of the solution. It is in fact cloud based as many of the ITSM systems nowadays are as well, so we don’t have to have any local infrastructure to support the whole setup.”
The ease and speed of setting up new integrations
“I was surprised by the ease of the integrations and also the speed that you could achieve while doing that. As I said, being able to integrate two ServiceNow instances within two weeks is quite remarkable.”
High-quality, continued support
“We also get support along with it whenever we need it. That wasn’t just an empty promise, we actually got all the support that we needed and when we needed it.”
Marco Peetz concludes
"I didn’t know how we could achieve that with native integrations because it’s so complex. But with ONEiO that was just a matter of configuring it. It was really awesome”
