Background
Milliken & Co. has been creating innovative products, empowering individuals, and building a brighter future for over 150 years. A global leader in specialty chemicals, floor covering, and textiles, Milliken has manufacturing facilities in the United States, Mexico, United Kingdom, Belgium, France, China, and Australia. Their sales offices, showrooms, development laboratories, and technical support centers extend Milliken’s presence throughout the world. Their corporate headquarters are at the Roger Milliken Center (RMC) in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which is home to nearly 1,000 employees.
Challenges
The pandemic impacted every type of business in 2020. As a global company, Milliken was able to integrate learnings as they unfolded from their teams in China, Europe, and eventually the Americas. However, one of the challenges that peaked quickly was that the IT team need to ensure that collaboration tools were in place and that their support processes were strong enough to facilitate greater collaboration from new work stations outside of their standard facilities.
IT’s role was identified very early in the pandemic as the enabler for continuing operations. Milliken experienced significant growth in the number of help desk tickets and the number of requests coming through to the support team. Creating robust processes was a good place to start so that their IT team was able to provide better support. But, they knew they would need a tool to help them improve the opportunity for employees to self-support, while also keeping the door open for greater collaboration.
“We’re always focused on improving the customer experience and customer service” said Nigel West, IS Director at Milliken & Co. “Obviously it’s key to keeping the business running even through difficult times.”
Solution
After decades on a service management tool that was built and grown in-house, Milliken decided it was time to begin their digital transformation journey by evaluating service management tools.
“We were looking for a single solution that integrated both asset management and service management, that would allow us to address our current situation and allow for future operations as we scale up,” said Clayton Houchins, Business Analyst at Milliken & Co.
As Milliken dove in their search, they attended conferences and consulted with analyst firms, like Gartner. Through those conversations, they saw that many solutions were either mostly service focused or asset focused. The Milliken team believed there had to be a solution in the market that had robust features in both of those spaces to create a unified solution that could help advance their maturity.
“We were looking for a product that not only had some good current robust features, but also had a good roadmap for the future advanced features,” said Houchins. “With this focus we were able to zero in on SymphonyAI Summit as our provider for both asset management and service management.”
Benefits
SymphonyAI Summit has helped Milliken transform their delivery of IT support, by helping them to provide a better employee experience and allow their users to engage in self-service with a centralized knowledge base. From an asset management perspective, Millken has gained control of not only their IT assets within their headquarters, but also those that are out in the manufacturing facilities.
“SymphonyAI Summit has given us better visibility and allowed us to optimize the costs of those assets and improve efficiency,” said Houchins. “It has been able to deliver the full life cycle of an asset from procurement and ordering, all the way through the disposal of those assets.”
By gaining greater control over asset lifecycle management, the Milliken team was able to focus on using SymphonyAI Summit to create an integrated solution that gives them an entire asset management and service management solution together. With SymphonyAI Summit they were able to begin their journey toward digital transformation within IS as part of a larger global initiatives with the company.
In working with the team at SymphonyAI Summit, Milliken was able to focus on collaboration and efficiency, and formalize the processes and solutions. SymphonyAI Summit has allowed Milliken to create automations wherever it’s been possible. By investing time in building rules, knowledge records, and service catalogs within SymphonyAI Summit, and Milliken has been able to drive 100% adoption of the new service management solution. They have enabled self-help and routing of the tickets to the correct team, and eliminated email tickets.
“We had high expectations for the project,” said West. “And honestly, we’ve been a tough customer. We’ve challenged for improvements. The team has been good to work with, understanding the requirements and making some adjustments and improvements. We’re delighted with the service management module. And, we’re excited about the product, the chatbot, and other innovations. And it’s important for us to have a partner, a good partner, that we can work with. It’s been pretty easy with SymphonyAI Summit.”
