Anglepoint Optimizes ServiceNow Reporting for Retailer Goals
Company Profile
With over 31 million customers and 25,000 associates, this government-affiliated retailer is among the largest in the U.S. Focused on cost control and regulatory compliance, it has adopted a mature IT Asset Management (ITAM) strategy in partnership with Anglepoint since 2018. Anglepoint provides a comprehensive managed service program for the retailer’s top-tier software publishers.
Despite investing heavily in ServiceNow solutions—implementing ServiceNow Discovery, SAM Pro, and publisher packs –reporting remained a challenge. The out-of-the-box reporting features included in ServiceNow were misaligned with the retailer’s goals, making it difficult to extract actionable insights from vast amounts of dispersed data.
To resolve this, Anglepoint worked with the retailer to define key performance indicators (KPIs) for the ITAM program and built a custom dashboard with dynamic reporting capabilities. This enhancement ensures that the right intelligence reaches the right stakeholders at the right time, maximizing the retailer’s ServiceNow investment and ITAM program effectiveness.
The Challenge
Committed to providing affordable goods and services, this retailer prioritizes cost optimization. Additionally, as a government-affiliated entity, it must comply with strict regulations over software usage. To support these priorities, the organization has implemented ServiceNow, including publisher packs, ServiceNow Discovery, and SAM Pro.
In 2024, the retailer realized that it could further optimize its ServiceNow deployment for greater ROI. Its extensive IT estate generated vast amounts of software-related data, yet the internal ITAM team was not always able to transform this data into actionable insights. While ServiceNow’s built-in reporting offered some value, it lacked critical information. For example, there were gaps in the reporting of unauthorized and blacklisted software, posing compliance risks. In addition, renewal notifications were limited to a 30-day period, making it difficult for procurement to prepare for and negotiate new contract terms.
By customizing and automating ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities, the retailer sought to eliminate these blind spots, improve visibility into software compliance and renewals, and enhance tracking of KPIs around software-related spend and risk.
The Solution
As the retailer’s trusted ITAM partner since 2018, Anglepoint was the ideal choice to enhance and automate ServiceNow’s reporting capabilities.
As a first step, Anglepoint worked closely with the internal ITAM team to define clear reporting requirements and share it asset management best practices. This collaboration enabled both parties to identify essential metrics for the ServiceNow dashboard.
The Anglepoint team then designed the data model and implemented automated dashboards for both Software Asset Management (SAM) and Hardware Asset Management (HAM). Updated daily, these dashboards provide timely and actionable insights that are tailored to the needs of multiple stakeholders across the client’s organization; from the senior leadership team, procurement, lines of business, IT, and security.
These easy-to-use, intuitive dashboards also streamlined ITAM operations. The time taken to analyze raw data has been reduced from five hours to just minutes; a 99.7 percent efficiency gain that allows the ITAM team more time to spend on strategic initiatives.
Anglepoint’s customizations mean that the retailer is now able to track its entire IT estate against its own KPIs around cost optimization, security, and compliance. The retailer’s dashboard now provides granular intelligence on:
- Annual spend, potential savings, and high-risk products
- Blacklisted software and cloud deployments requiring remediation
- Contracts and entitlements due to expire within the next 90 days
- End-of-life software installs
- Devices not discovered within 90 days
- Software inventory coverage (comparing data feeds from Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and ServiceNow Discovery)
- Unnormalized licensable discovery models
- Custom products, software models, part numbers, and deactivated discovery maps (DMAPs)
Through these improvements, the retailer has gained deeper visibility, improved compliance, and maximized its ITAM investment, reinforcing ServiceNow as a strategic asset in its business operations. The retailer has plans to extend these capabilities in the future, working with Anglepoint to rollout further custom dashboards designed to deliver tailored insights to senior executives.
Results
- Streamlined ITAM operations: 99.7 percent time savings allow the internal ITAM team more time to focus on strategic business objectives.
- More meaningful data: Reporting customizations ensure that ITAM program metrics now align with business KPIs.
- Data-driven intelligence: Stakeholders across the business are empowered to take proactive, intelligence-led decisions to reduce IT expenditure and exposure to risk.
- Maximized Technology Capabilities: The custom dashboards built within ServiceNow help the retailer extract maximum value out of its tooling investments.