Hermes Streamlines Asset Management and Automates Business Processes with BMC Helix Solutions

As one of Germany’s leading logistics service providers, Hermes provides parcel delivery, fulfillment, transport, and logistics planning solutions to consumers and businesses in Germany and 28 countries across Europe, with 18,000 employees supporting more than 817 million shipments annually. Hermes also maintains more than 16,500 ParcelShops consumer locations throughout Germany.

Hermes faced significant asset management challenges across its widespread operational locations. It also relied on time-consuming and inefficient email and spreadsheet processes for its inventory, transport orders, safety reports, and equipment availability tracking that spanned pallets, corlettes, load-securing bars, and safety nets. 

To deliver service and operations excellence across the enterprise, Hermes wanted to digitize its business processes and increase its use of automation for equipment management, line-of-business (LoB) processes, and capacity monitoring at its physical locations, and:

• Automate its 100 percent manual transportation equipment and inventory management process
• Improve employee productivity, collaboration, and efficiency across the enterprise
• Create and deploy new applications and workflows quickly

Hermes selected a BMC Helix suite of solutions that included BMC Helix ITSM, BMC Helix Discovery, and BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced to apply automation across the business and implement a unified service portal. The company also invested in BMC Helix Business Workflows to expand service management into non-IT LoBs, including legal and operations, with no training required for users to request services. BMC Helix Innovation Studio, along with BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced, enabled Hermes to deploy self-service and improve cross-team collaboration with fast, simple, no-code, drag-and-drop application development.

With its investment in BMC Helix, Hermes improved its resource allocation by automating the workflows that supported daily transportation equipment inventory, matching, scheduling, and stakeholder push notifications across all locations. In addition to using BMC Helix ITSM and BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced solutions to manage its transportation fleet, Hermes quickly created new service management applications for its employees. 

During pandemic worksite restrictions, the company launched a customized lunch ordering app to help its canteen staff plan for and prepare meals and minimize physical contact. Essential personnel could order meals via the app and the staff would have them ready for contactless pickup on the next business day. It also designed a parking app to reallocate premium employee parking spaces that were otherwise empty during employee vacations.

The BMC Helix solutions have also helped Hermes achieve several critical objectives, including:

• Real-time reporting and analysis on license consumption within a requested timespan
• Dramatically reducing phone and email case submissions with intuitive self-help
• Reducing complexity and manual intervention and redirecting employees to higher-value tasks
• Creating and deploying 25 new service management applications within a unified service catalog
• Reducing processes across the enterprise to 23 views, 23 processes, eight rules, and 14 associations to streamline collaboration between teams involved in asset management 
• Unifying 10 separate process databases into a single, automated workflow

Hermes plans to expand BMC Helix Business Workflows to digitize other non-IT LoBs, including facilities, marketing, and corporate security. The company is also exploring continued improvements to the digital employee experience and cross-team collaboration through integration of BMC Helix Digital Workplace Studio, BMC Helix Virtual Agent, and BMC Helix Knowledge Management.