At Lion, a US$2.5 billion beverage manufacturer operating across Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, something as routine as accessing HR support could involve navigating multiple tools and service channels. The company’s People & Culture operations relied on more than 56 legacy channels, creating unnecessary complexity for employees seeking information or completing everyday tasks. For a business coordinating manufacturing, distribution, and retail operations, those inefficiencies added to the challenge of managing costs while maintaining the services its workforce depended on.
Lion was already under pressure to become more efficient as consumer preferences shifted and demand changed across its core beverage categories. Yet its leadership also wanted to protect operational resilience, innovation, and the employee culture it had built across a workforce of approximately 6,000 people. Addressing those priorities meant looking beyond individual processes to how work moved across the organization, particularly where disconnected systems and inconsistent service experiences were creating friction.
Working with EY and ServiceNow, Lion undertook a broader redesign of employee services across HR, IT, and finance, bringing them together through a common experience and workflow platform. The transformation has since delivered measurable improvements, including a 200% increase in self-service usage, an 87% improvement in first-contact resolution and a roughly 30% improvement in operating costs across its People function, according to EY. What makes the project particularly instructive is that Lion already had ServiceNow in place for HR but had struggled to achieve the adoption and employee experience it expected.
Why Lion Started with the Employee Journey
According to Barak Ravid, EY’s Global Alliance Chief Commercial Officer for ServiceNow, organizations often approach cost reduction by examining existing operations and looking for ways to make individual processes cheaper. Lion took a broader view, asking how it could improve efficiency while preserving the resilience, innovation, and culture needed to support its business.
That approach influenced how EY and Lion tackled the underperforming ServiceNow deployment. Rather than immediately expanding its functionality, they revisited the employee experience itself, beginning with discovery workshops involving HR, IT, and frontline stakeholders. EY teams mapped the full employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding through career development and retirement, to understand where employees encountered delays, confusing processes, or difficulty accessing support.
The findings were converted into user stories, future-state journeys, and success criteria before workflows were built or reconfigured in ServiceNow. This gave the implementation team a clearer understanding of what employees needed and which processes had to change to deliver it.
Ravid describes the work as a “re-design and re-implementation,” pointing out that Lion’s existing HR platform had not generated the levels of adoption, feedback, or self-service engagement the company wanted. The discovery process helped explain why. Improving the technology would have limited value if employees continued encountering the same problems through a redesigned interface.
The workshops therefore shaped both the technical implementation and the way the new service experience would be introduced to employees. EY also worked with Lion to test whether those design decisions held up in practice, particularly for frontline workers whose needs and habits could differ considerably from those of office-based employees.
What Frontline Testing Revealed About Adoption
EY developed prototypes of the redesigned employee journeys and tested them with Lion employees across office, retail, and manufacturing operations. Participants completed tasks in early versions of the system while the project team gathered qualitative feedback and tracked usability as development progressed. This allowed the team to identify confusing interactions and make adjustments before the wider rollout.
One unexpected finding concerned the search function. Employees had become so accustomed to poor search experiences in legacy systems that many were reluctant to use search in the redesigned platform, even before testing whether it worked.
“Many didn’t even attempt to use the search because they simply assumed it didn’t work well,” Ravid says.
That reluctance exposed a problem that conventional requirements gathering might have overlooked. Employees could have access to more accurate information and better search capabilities, yet still avoid using them because of habits formed around previous technology. The design therefore needed to support different ways of finding information rather than assuming employees would naturally adopt a search-first approach.
EY incorporated multiple routes to content and used the findings to shape the change management and communications plans. Acknowledging the frustrations associated with the previous system became part of encouraging employees to engage with the new one.
The testing also reinforced the value of involving employees who would use the system daily, rather than relying exclusively on requirements gathered from HR and IT leadership. By observing how people completed tasks, the project team could address usability problems while there was still time to change the design.
Those findings fed into the wider platform architecture, where Lion needed to make employee services easier to access while maintaining clear responsibilities for the enterprise applications supporting them.
Bringing HR, IT and Finance Together Without Replacing Their Core Systems
ServiceNow became the common experience and workflow layer through which employees could access HR, IT and finance services. Behind that interface, Lion retained SAP SuccessFactors as its HR master data system and integrated DocuSign for electronic signatures. The project also involved moving IT support from Cherwell to ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), redesigning service catalogs and improving the routing of requests.
The approach drew on the respective capabilities of EY, ServiceNow and Lion’s existing enterprise technology. EY supported the employee journey redesign, platform implementation, testing, and governance, while ServiceNow provided the orchestration capabilities needed to connect services and workflows across functions. Existing applications continued to perform their designated roles, reducing the need to duplicate information or rebuild capabilities already available elsewhere.
For Ravid, that separation is fundamental to designing a consistent employee experience across multiple enterprise applications.
“We advise clients to think of the experience layer as the front door and the system of record as the source of truth,” he explains.
In practice, the employee-facing portal can simplify how people find information, submit requests and access support, while applications such as SAP SuccessFactors continue to maintain the underlying business records. Making that arrangement work depends on clear data ownership, consistent service taxonomy, content standards, integration governance, and configuration management database (CMDB) controls.
Lion and EY addressed those requirements by consolidating knowledge, catalogs, and workflow assets and establishing a consistent taxonomy across HR and IT. Standardized information and routing rules helped direct employee requests to the appropriate services, reducing the confusion associated with the previous environment.
The impact is visible in the adoption and service performance figures. According to EY, more than 95% of cases across 49 People & Culture services are now managed through the ServiceNow portal, replacing more than 56 legacy channels. Self-service usage increased 200% following go-live, while employees accessed IT and HR knowledge more than 14,000 times during the first seven months.
Service performance improved alongside adoption. Resolution times were cut in half, People Services response speed improved 75% and first-contact resolution for employee requests rose 87%. Task success increased 40%, and employee satisfaction with People Services reached 85%.
These improvements reflect the combined effect of redesigned journeys, more accessible knowledge and more consistent request routing. They also help explain why the project extended beyond simplifying employee interactions to strengthening the technology and risk management processes supporting Lion’s wider operations.
Connecting Employee Services to Operational Resilience
For a beverage manufacturer, the ability to keep production and distribution running depends partly on visibility into the technology systems supporting those operations. Lion’s transformation therefore extended into IT operations and risk management, where fragmented support processes and incomplete configuration information could complicate the identification and resolution of problems.
As part of the move from Cherwell to ServiceNow ITSM, Lion consolidated IT support processes, substantially reduced ticket categories and introduced more consistent service management workflows. EY also helped improve the CMDB and develop IT Operations Management workstreams aligned with Lion’s technology environment, including its manufacturing operations.
The improvements gave Lion a more consistent way to manage technology assets, service dependencies, and support requests. They also supported the company’s broader efforts to improve IT and operational technology visibility, an important consideration for identifying and addressing incidents that could affect production.
An integrated risk management environment contributed to a 60% reduction in active cyber risks. Combined with improvements in case automation and service handling, the broader transformation also supported the roughly 30% improvement in operating costs across Lion’s People function.
These developments expanded the value of the ServiceNow investment beyond employee-facing services. With more consistent service management data and clearer operational dependencies, Lion could strengthen its approach to managing technology risks while maintaining the efficiency gains achieved through workflow redesign.
The same emphasis on data quality and governance has become central to Lion’s plans for AI, particularly as the company looks to automate more employee interactions.
Why AI Readiness Depends on the Work Already Done
Lion’s AI plans build on the knowledge, workflow and governance improvements established during the ServiceNow transformation. Before introducing more advanced automation, EY and Lion consolidated underlying information, standardized service processes, and created a framework for introducing new capabilities through phased deployments.
Ravid says that preparation is essential because AI systems depend on the accuracy, accessibility, and governance of the information they use. Data must be appropriately permissioned, with clear ownership and lineage, so that automated services can retrieve information and route requests reliably.
“Layering AI on top of an already messy system doesn’t clean up the mess, it just gives the mess a faster interface. If a company can’t explain where its data came from or whether it’s accurate, expanding AI becomes even more difficult as users lose trust and confidence in what the AI is surfacing,” he says.
The concern becomes particularly relevant when AI tools need to work across multiple enterprise systems. An employee using a virtual agent to resolve an HR issue, for example, may interact with a ServiceNow interface while the underlying employee data remains in SAP SuccessFactors. The experience depends on accurate information, right permissions, and well-defined workflows connecting the systems.
The groundwork at Lion has enabled early experimentation with ServiceNow’s Now Assist generative AI capabilities and virtual agents. According to EY, early pilots achieved 25% containment, suggesting that some employee interactions could be completed within the automated experience without requiring further escalation. Broader deployment remains phased, with new capabilities evaluated against usability standards and service-level requirements.
For Lion, those controls provide a way to introduce automation gradually while protecting the reliability of services employees already use. They also connect its AI ambitions to the continuous improvement model established after the initial platform deployment.
Lion moved into a managed services arrangement ahead of the timetable originally envisioned in its six-year transformation program, establishing ongoing responsibilities across IT support, IT operations, HR and risk. That model allows the company to continue refining workflows, introducing capabilities and measuring whether the platform meets changing employee needs.
Ravid believes the measures used to judge success must evolve as the platform matures. Initial deployment figures may establish whether a new service has gained traction, but sustained value depends on how effectively employees can use it and whether their needs continue to be met. Resolution speed, service levels and employee satisfaction therefore remain relevant long after go-live. “When deployment numbers are no longer relevant, you can look at adoption rates and how people are using the new platform. Value is measured by whether employees’ needs are being met. For Lion, that meant continuing to track resolution speed and employee satisfaction well after the early stage deployment to ensure the platform continued to meet ever-evolving user needs,” Ravid says.
Lion’s experience illustrates how those decisions are connected. The employee journey redesign informed the ServiceNow implementation, frontline testing improved usability, and clearer responsibilities across enterprise systems supported more consistent service delivery. Those changes produced measurable operational gains while establishing the governance and information structure needed for further automation.
