Success Story -

About Henny Penny

Founded in 1957 and based in Eaton, Ohio, Henny Penny is an American manufacturer of commercial-grade food service equipment including pressure and open fryers, combination ovens, rotisseries, holding cabinets, and display merchandisers.

Over the years, Henny Penny has received multiple awards from the National Restaurant Association and Dayton Business Journal's Business of the Year Award, to name a few.

Since 2015, the company has been employee-owned with two-thirds of its workforce assembling products on the production floor while the remaining one-third comprises office and auxiliary staff. Henny Penny employs over 1,000 people and serves customers worldwide.

Industry

Food Service Machinery Manufacturing

Software

Service Desk, Self-Service Portal, Incident Management, Change Management, AI-Feature Pack

Benefits

• Digital Transformation
• IT Modernization

The Challenge

Henny Penny's IT department was running on "ancient" software with its user interface and functionality firmly rooted in the 1990s—the "dark ages" of information technology. Back then, companies used to upgrade their software at predetermined intervals, which usually meant once a year because Microsoft tended to release its operating system upgrades on an annual basis. Henny Penny continued to apply patches and upgrades to their IT application through 2014, when they recognized the need for a major change in their entire service request and incident management processes—along with the software that controlled those functions.

The organization required a flexible and scalable solution that would allow manufacturing personnel and office staff to submit and track requests, while also providing everyone quick and easy access to documentation such as technical manuals, test procedures, training guides, CAD drawings, parts lists, and other file types.

They also needed a system that would allow employees to manage their IT infrastructure in the most efficient way possible, enabling coordinated planning, designing, and delivering of IT services. It became a priority to find an application that would help their entire organization adopt and adapt to new changes and processes more efficiently as their business continued to grow.

The Solution

In January of 2015, Henny Penny's IT department selected ChangeGear Service Desk to help transform service and support. The purpose of this initial rollout was to handle unplanned interruptions in IT services (i.e., Incident Management) and to control the changes that flow through their IT systems (i.e., Change Management).

The management team was so impressed with ChangeGear that they decided to expand the use of the Incident Management and Change Management modules throughout the enterprise. The Infrastructure Support Analyst explained, "We have this suite of products [ChangeGear] that we like using and it can also solve our problems, so we didn't see the need to look anywhere else." Then, they elaborated, "People above me said, 'We have it. We like it. We want to use it more' to maximize our investment."

They continued to engage with Serviceaide's Professional Services engineers to implement ChangeGear Service Desk version 8.0 with the Advanced Intelligence Pack, which includes AI features.

"Suggestion Center is still the most impressive AI feature to me. That's the one that most directly impacts time savings and helps our IT staff help end-users. A close follow up is the Field Recommender. Filling out tickets can be a pain if you have a ton of different service request types or if you're trying to route them through different things. When it [Field Recommender] fills in a couple fields for you, that's a big time-saver." — Infrastructure Support Analyst, Henny Penny

The Results

Employees across all jobs submit tickets through Henny Penny's Self-Service Portal (SSP) and many of them routinely use the chatbot to quickly find the answers they need. Each IT analyst saves a couple hours a week which adds up to real savings (the equivalent of a full-time employee). The AI Feature Pack is delivering real savings and increasing productivity. The number is only expected to increase as Henny Penny continues to grow.

One of Henny Penny's long-term goals is to integrate their shopping cart with SHI International Corp. This will reduce the number of different models and configurations that people can order. They have a list of specific devices—defined by role—that end-users can order. ChangeGear can generate a Purchase Order, which can trigger an entire Capital Expenditures (CapEx) process increasing the efficiency.

Beyond their operationally friendly and innovative products, Henny Penny continues to set itself apart from the competition by focusing on the overall customer experience, nurturing their key distributor and operator relationships, and making sure they continue to position themselves at the leading edge of identifying and solving their customers' problems. Notable clients include KFC, Wendy's, McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, and other well-known brands.

About Serviceaide

Serviceaide is a leader in modern service management. Serviceaide's vision is to transform service management, across ITSM, ESM, and Customer Service. Serving customers around the world, Serviceaide applies breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to deliver better experiences, provide enhanced self-service and empower service owners. Serviceaide transforms service through digital labor conversations, automation, and knowledge.