ServiceNow’s App Engine is great to design ServiceNow business apps that meet both your simple and complex business needs. The ability for developers at all skill levels to easily work with App Engine is one of the platform’s greatest benefits.
With App Engine, the ServiceNow platform provides you flexible tools to add custom ServiceNow business apps on top of the out-of-the-box modules. This is particularly useful for enabling the digital transformation of organization-specific processes.
However, we see many cases where this full potential of the platform is not used. Why? Simply because organizations or departments are not aware of what is possible, or they don’t know how to get started with custom application development.
So, time to discover what kind of awesome ServiceNow business apps you can build to solve your business challenges!
We have many years’ worth of experience with custom app development. We even won a global ServiceNow award for App Development. But there are 5 apps that stand out. They are the proof of what innovative digital transformation brings to our customers.
The one that we are just that little bit prouder of than any of the apps we’ve built, is 4Facility, which now goes under the name of Workplace Service Delivery Suite.
What we saw when we first stuck our teeth into building 4Facility were loads of frustrated employees and facility managers.
With facility managers trying to manage and track services with manual processes (like pen and paper) and applications (like Outlook and Excel), workplace management was an extremely inefficient process. The lack of clarity on how and where to request services was a cause of constant frustration for employees.
So, we built a service management app and we developed a 3D interactive floor plan, the likes of which had never been seen before. It won us the 2014 Innovation Award and the app took off from there.
Since then, the app has become the go-to app to manage and track everything in a central facility management system. The app’s core Space and Case Management functionalities have transformed the lives of employees and facility managers. Above all, it’s made booking desks, rooms, cars, parking spaces and much more so incredibly easy to do.
At one of the largest global pharmaceutical companies, different teams were using different systems and processes to provide services to fellow workers within the organization.
This was resulting in a poor employee experience and reduced operational efficiency. An app was needed to support rapid deployment of new department-specific case management apps (Team Zones).
We built a ServiceNow business app that automated most of the technical stuff needed for different teams and departments to onboard to ServiceNow. In this way, we lowered the migration costs and threshold for teams to opt-in.
ServiceNow is now easy to adopt for any team that wants to mature its service processes. The Team Zone app can readily deploy a Case Management solution on ServiceNow, including portals and catalogs.
At a large chemical company, managing the master data in SAP was a slow, labor-intensive operation. When we were called in, the process was handled through email, making the required full traceability and clear responsibility of data validation not only a long but also fault-sensitive process.
The ServiceNow business app we built was a pro-code solution for IT as an extension to the ERP, handling request management for all kinds of MDM requests (Customer, Vendor, Material, Cost Centers) that needed to be processed. We designed the app so that it uploads Excels following a certain template.
This template is automatically transformed to data in ServiceNow. Then, an approval flow is triggered to ensure additional validation and ownership of the data. Finally, the validated data is sent to SAP to be processed by BAPI.
The lead time of processing new data was reduced from days to hours and the required effort per request from hours to seconds. The compliance team was left with a clear, real-time audit trail with approvals for all data changes.
Going Green with Technology was the theme of one of our annual ServiceNow hackathons (which by the way are the biggest ServiceNow hackathons in the world!). During this 3-day event, we took a new view at what technology can do to contribute to a greener world.
For us, there’s no better iconic symbol of green + tech than a Tesla car. During the hackathon, we worked in teams to build innovative new features on the ServiceNow platform, and we managed to achieve some astonishing results.
In just two days, we built a ServiceNow solution for fully automated fleet management of connected pool cars, including cool features like locating, unlocking and starting a Tesla from your mobile device.
Last, but not least, on our list of most innovative apps is an app that started as something very small. And that turned into something very big.
It started with the need to enhance workflow intelligence and ended up as powerful app that extends an organization’s ERP.
Working for a major Dutch beer brewer, we were convinced we could somehow improve production efficiencies on the shopfloor. How? By building a ServiceNow business app that would optimize factory workflows and increase uptime, with operator-enablement in mind. And we succeeded!
Once this app had proved its worth, we moved on to build 4Industry, a connected worker platform (CWP) aimed at increasing Operational Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). This mobile-enabled platform connects your IoT sensors, systems, operators and plant assets, pairing these with the tools to manage them all for optimal performance.
By now, we’ve guided multiple major global manufacturers in digitizing their shopfloor workflows with 4Industry.
As a dedicated ServiceNow partner, we have been developing ServiceNow business apps for 10 years, resulting in winning the Global App Development Platform Partner of the Year 2021 award.
Based on deep knowledge of Now platform capabilities, our expert ServiceNow developers design solutions for even the most unconventional business challenges. With the help of reusable assets, methodologies, integrations and building blocks, we can accelerate any implementation.
If your business is facing a challenge that can’t be fully addressed by standard (out of the box) functionality, we’ll gladly organize a strategy session to discuss your business need and how it can be solved with a tailored app.
Tim Simon ServiceNow App Development Expert
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