ServiceNow Acquires Quality 360 Manufacturing Application From Elite Partner Advania

‘We realize that customers want us to put these things that are extremely strategic to them together within one ServiceNow offering, and that’s aligned with our strategy too. ... Quality was always in our plans, but a partner did it, and it’s got validation from the market. Acquiring it now lets us package it a lot quicker,’ says ServiceNow executive Rohit Batra.

Business transformation and digital workflow software developer ServiceNow Wednesday unveiled the acquisition of the Quality 360 application from one of its Elite channel partners, Stockholm, Sweden-based Advania.

With the acquisition, ServiceNow will enhance its ability to provide transformation and digital workflow services via its ServiceNow Now platform in the manufacturing industry, said Rohit Batra (pictured), vice president and general manager for the manufacturing, telecom, media and tech industries at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

Product quality is one of the biggest challenges manufacturers face, Batra told CRN.

“The quality of the products has an impact directly on your reputation,” he said. “It has a direct impact on top-line revenue and also on bottom-line profitability when you have to make recalls or repairs to the product once it’s actually shipped to your customers. Quality is not an isolated problem. It goes across the entire value chain ecosystem of the manufacturer. It goes across customers, all the way to factories and maybe even design. That’s a workflow challenge.”

Advania built Quality 360 on top of the ServiceNow platform to help manage the entire quality process from the time a customer raises an issue until how it gets reported, managed and maintained, Batra said.

Quality 360 provides AI-powered root cause analysis, automated issue detection and structured resolution frameworks, along with a centralized Quality Workspace, standardized playbooks and real-time communication tools, ServiceNow said.

ServiceNow has been building its manufacturing product capabilities for some time, starting with the data model that it already has built, Batra said. The company has been enhancing its manufacturing workflow capabilities in every semi-annual ServiceNow Now platform release, with recent additions including recall management, warranty claims and repair management, and a dealer operations portal, he said.

“Customers are actually deploying our manufacturing product for such use cases so that they can get to market faster and quicker,” he said. “The quality side was in our plans for next year to build it in our road map. This acquisition helps us to have a foundation and maybe actually even accelerate it now that we have the IP and some design and code.”

ServiceNow’s manufacturing business has four sub-verticals: heavy industry, chemicals, consumer products group and automotive.

ServiceNow has purchased other technologies from its channel partners to add to its Now platform, Batra said. For instance, ServiceNow in late 2023 acquired the Toolbox OH&S assets from one of its ServiceNow Elite partners, Australia-based Enable Professional Services.

“We see the need for these use cases today,” he said. “We also see the need to accelerate on our investment and our product strategy and road map. We also realize that customers want us to put these things that are extremely strategic to them together within one ServiceNow offering, and that’s aligned with our strategy, too. We do this because it’s built on our platform, so we know that it is something we can make into a product offering very quickly. Also, it’s a way for us to accelerate our road map. Quality was always inour plans, but a partner did it, and it’s got validation from the market. Acquiring it now lets us package it a lot quicker.”

Batra said acquisitions like this also inspire partners to build more and more on the Now platform.

“They can see a path to not just monetize it themselves, but also a route where, if it’s strategic to ServiceNow and the way we are directionally moving as an organization and for the industry, we will make it a part of our road map going forward,” he said.

Batra declined to discuss how much ServiceNow paid for Quality 360. However, he said, it was less than what the company would have invested to build the offering itself.

Quality 360 will likely be available on the ServiceNow Now platform sometime next year, he said. It generally takes two to three releases of the Now platform to do the integration and testing.

Quality 360, like all ServiceNow offerings, will be available to the company’s channel partner base, he said.