Last Updated: August 2025

Users at the logistics provider were experiencing ServiceNow platform issues. It was running slowly and was impossible to identify where the problem was occurring. The company had policies for their coding practices, like naming conventions and RegEx expressions, but they were difficult to check on and enforce. The applications the developers built would break in production because of technical debt already present in the platform. This impacted customer deliverables and future development. It also demotivated the talent, who were spending their time on workarounds or refactoring code. Additionally, the time and cost implications of using senior developers onmanual processes meant that innovative work was only happening in places. These factors were all leading to high levels of talent churn.

The Challenge

Sluggish processes are not uncommon in companies that have been using ServiceNow for several years. They are often caused by technical debt building up in the platform. This can occur when:

• Platform-specific best practices interfere with general coding best practices.

• Remote work leads to a negative impact on due diligence.

• Teams focus on fast results, over best practices.

• New packages are introduced that are not consistent with org standards and design principles.

• There is insufficient software testing.

Key Results with Quality Clouds

• $300k savings from issue fixes (Early bug detection)

• Issue free CE’s introduced: 40k+

• 15% decrease in lines of code with issues

• 1300+ HRS technical debt reduced

The Desired Solution

The customer was looking for best practices in their platform and their coding process to stabilize their development lifecycle. They needed a tool that could provide transparency across their development teams as well as ensure technical debt was kept to a minimum. In summary, their goals were to;

• Keep a check on the technical debt being introduced from new projects

• Train the new developers on Quality Clouds best practices

• Proactively control issues from being promoted to higher instances by developer resources from partners

  
  

The Resolution: Find It. Fix It. Prevent It.

Quality Clouds was able to give the logistics provider the automation needed to do code reviews in real time. Their own rules and policies were integrated into the Quality Clouds technology, LiveCheck, to automate them. This relieved the pressure on the developers. Quality Clouds does this by identifying areas where code is impacted. It then categorizes the individual elements and helps customers to manage and remediate the risk areas. These are usually areas where the issue is impacting the production system or the development effectiveness. The process of scanning the platform also gave the Platform Owner complete visibility of the issues. In the trial, the team could see technical debt increasing in real time. Sharing this level of visibility made it possible to enforce their best practices across multiple vendors and to hold them accountable. In this first stage, the Logistics Provider has been able to remove the mediated issues across a wide range of configuration elements from across the platform. There is now a concentration of issues across a few elements, which means the provider has been able to develop a more targeted approach to remediating applications. Where issues have had to be written off, the provider has a decision history that explains the process.

The Impact

By using Quality Clouds, the customer was able to achieve measurable outcomes that delivered a positive impact on their process and their bottom line;

• Reduced technical debt accumulating year on year by 85% while the inventory customization grew by 26% on average

• Reduced the number of incidents and outages by 10%
  Platform Security related issues grew only marginally by 1%

• Only 3% of development activity had issues found in them

They also added visibility, freed up developer time, and produced greater control:

• Eradicated the need for time-consuming manual reviews

• Prevented issues from being introduced at the source

• Strengthened control over existing platform technical debt

• Increased platform governance and visibility

• Centralized best practice management

• Drove performance

• Heightened productivity

  
  

“Quality Clouds is business critical for us, they control the standard of our development by putting in gates that align with our best practices and freeing up my time from manual code reviews, so my team can focus more on Innovating and less on fixing.”

Logistics Provider Executive

The Impact: 500 Hours Of Technical Debt Prevented

By using Quality Clouds, the client saw tangible results that significantly improved processes and their bottom line. They added 4,000 configuration elements and 33,000 lines of code to their instance and still found:

• Development activities increased by 2%

• Platform Performance issues decreased by 6%

• Performance Issues decreased by 6%

Using Quality Clouds suite of features they also added visibility, freed up developer time, and produced greater:

• Removing the need for time-consuming manual code reviews

• Prevented issues from being introduced at the source

• Strengthened control over existing platform technical debt

• Increased platform governance and visibility

• Centralized best practice management

• Drove performance and productivity