Service Catalog – Manage Employees Workstation Requirements Effectively

In this age of rapidly increasing digital transformation, businesses have understood the value of IT as an important catalyst in creating greater brand value and gaining an advantage over competitors. ServiceNow Service Catalog app, provide customers with self-service preferences which provide a satisfactory and swift option to them by customizing their portals where the customers can look for customized catalog items like service and product offerings as per their choice.

The Service Catalog automates routine tasks and repetitive tasks in an organization which makes the service desk more efficient while improving the customer experience and thus reducing the operation time and costs. APIs provided by Service Catalog enables portals to use them without the need for any customization or extreme coding.

Features offered by Service Catalog

Service Catalog provides a wide range of features that includes but are not limited to:

Centralized End User Request Portal
The centralized service catalog request portal allows end-users to access the service catalog requests for all departments in IT services like project requirements and upgrades, office equipment and supplies, and any other professional services from a single user-friendly portal.

Allows Drag-and-Drop Workflow
With Service catalog workflows, complex multi-step processes can be easily defined by the admins for achieving and approving a service request. With inbuilt automation, each catalog item can have a unique workflow that can be edited graphically and business rules.

Supports Multi-Catalog
Using a Service catalog, users can manage multiple catalogs that provide services to different teams within an organization, such as IT, Facilities, Accounting, and Human Resources. Through a single page, users can access multiple catalogs, with an option to search through the catalogs, or directly within a catalog. Also, this provides an option to list a particular catalog item across one or more categories. This means an item can be listed under one or more categories as needed.

Wishlist Creation
With a wishlist provided with ServiceNow-based Service Catalog, users can now save a catalog item to their wishlist which can be ordered at a later stage. This gives the option to purchase an item at a later stage after selecting it. Items from the wishlist can be moved to the cart for the checkout process and can be modified in case if needed. Any data that is entered either fully or partly in the system will be saved while a wishlist is created.

Approval and Status Checks
The ServiceNow Service Catalog offers a rigid and swift notification system and automatic audit trails while minimizing service request delays and tracking service request activity respectively. The status of any service request can be checked by the requestors as well as approvers while the managers can manage the approvals made using email or their smart devices.

Automated Test Framework
Automated Tests Framework or ATF is provided with Service Catalog which allows admins to write any automated tests to validate the catalog items. These automated test cases build using ATF can be used multiple times for testing purposes.

Diagnostics and Troubleshooting

Service Catalog by ServiceNow provides excellent diagnostics and troubleshooting for portals. Few troubleshooting capabilities provided by Service Catalog are:

• By monitoring an item, the service catalog provides a list of diagnostic results also called as Item Diagnostic Report. It identifies any potential issues with an item’s data and its configuration. These diagnostic result entries include a rule with a record that violates the rule i.e., document and number of violations in the item record.
• In case any UI macros are skipped due to local customizations, service catalog upgrades can be easily managed with troubleshooting capabilities provided by ServiceNow.
• Troubleshooting by service catalog also allows users to incorporate any changes done in the system, view those changes, or in case of any concern, reverting back to the original system behavior.
• Variable action logger, in addition, provides an account of scripts that have been triggered on an item, while identifying and correcting any violations thus giving an optimal system performance.

Benefits of using Service Catalog

• With an easy-to-use interface, the service catalog provides a wider path to end users by providing a seamless self-service experience.
• While minimizing any duplicate efforts by the team and faster execution of the processes, it Increases overall operational efficiency with accurate information.
• With a service catalog, demand related to services, costs associated with it and any course of improvement in the system can be assessed and published thus showing a business’ success story.