We spoke to Juho Kuoppala, who runs the Service Management Office at Valio. He is responsible for vendor management, processes as well as internal IT tools, including ServiceNow. In summary, Valio launched Data Content Manager and significantly improved their Business Application Data Quality in just two months.
About Valio
Valio, offering the taste of Nordic nature since 1905, is a brand leader in Finland and a major player in the international dairy ingredients market. Valio’s product development follows in the footsteps of Nobel Prize winner A. I. Virtanen, and the company holds over 300 patents in 50 countries.
Valio has net sales of EUR 1.7 billion and is Finland’s most prominent food exporter. Valio’s products are found in some 60 countries and account for 25% of Finland’s total food exports. In addition, Valio has subsidiaries in Russia, Sweden, the Baltics, the USA, and China. Valio employs a total of 25,000 people at dairy farms and 4,000 professionals at Valio.
The Problem
Valio has outsourced most of its IT environment management to various IT vendors. They also maintain and manage configuration data. From Valio’s point of view, the quality of their CMDB has been a challenge ever since they adopted ITSM.
Juho says: “We were unable to systematically find issues in our configuration data and bring them to the attention of the responsible people. As a result, we needed to do manual work to detect any issues. We launched occasional one-off queries into the data and dealt with any findings manually.”
Data Content Manager
With Data Content Manager, Valio was able to introduce a systematic approach to managing data quality. Valio began using DCM for Business Application data first.
Valio immediately got a very realistic view of their Business Application data quality. Since DCM provides tangible metrics, it was easy to track progress. In just two months, data quality was already at 125% compared to the starting point with little required effort.
After the initial improvement, DCM continued to work as expected. For example, when people left, DCM recognized this as a slight drop in data quality due to the audits finding inactive managers in the data.
Juho continues: “In addition to the significant improvement in the quality of our data, DCM with its clear dashboards has made it possible for us to make data quality visible for all relevant stakeholders. DCM has helped us raise awareness about the importance of data quality, and it is now a part of our operative process – both internally and with our vendors.”
Great Tool, but Don’t Forget People!
Valio has rapidly gone from performing annual audits to a systematic process that supports continuous improvement regarding data quality on ServiceNow. Now data is audited continuously, and any deviations are dealt with as they occur.
“DCM forces a reality check on you. It works very well and finds what you need to fix. Getting DCM up and running was easy but getting the organization on board takes more time. However, the visual and facts-based approach of DCM helps there, too.”, says Juho.
He continues: “Qualdatrix assisted us in the beginning and was very easy to work with and professional. We expect DCM usage to expand in the future.”
Mikko Juola, the Chief Product Officer for Qualdatrix, comments:
“We often say that you can get first results in hours, not weeks or months, with Data Content Manager. So we were pleased to see Juho and his team turn those results into quick actions and gain a substantial data quality improvement already with the first use case.”
Data Content Manager is a ServiceNow certified add-on that enforces your data models and helps maintain and improve your data quality. As a result, you can increase the effectiveness and automation of your workflows while reducing unnecessary manual work and costly errors. No developers, customizations, or scripting are needed.
DCM works on any data, including custom tables. Typical use cases are around CMDB & CSDM, Asset Management and Integrations Data Quality, etc. The tool is straightforward to set up and produces results in a matter of hours, not weeks or months
