STACK Infrastructure provides innovative data center solutions to its customers across the globe—including throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. STACK delivers a comprehensive suite of campus, build-to-suit, colocation, and powered shell solutions—offering its customers the digital infrastructure they need in order to scale up and grow. STACK EMEA (STACK) ensures its customers have consistent, reliable infrastructure across the entire Nordic portfolio, which currently includes facilities in Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. They provide 24/7 support and manage over 3,000 assets, including power and cooling units, electrical distribution infrastructure, cooling pumps, data racks, and more. The Challenge Minimizing downtime is a round-the-clock job and demands proactive, automated asset and facility management. The Nordic team used many processes across different systems that often didn’t integrate. For example, their facilities management and change management teams used separate systems, which led to many emails back and forth. Technicians found themselves duplicating the information across platforms with a copy-and-paste method. In order to streamline collaboration, improve efficiencies, and meet compliance certification (for example, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001) requirements, they needed to consolidate tools and gather everything within the same platform. The STACK team was already using ServiceNow as their ITSM solution. Therefore, as Nuvolo Connected Workplace is natively Built on NOW™, they were able to seamlessly extend their existing tech load to include comprehensive asset and maintenance management. Managing Assets and Locations The Nordic team uses Nuvolo to track and manage assets at its Norwegian and Swedish sites. They handle over 1,000 work orders every month in the system, which includes preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, and inspections. To make sure operations run smoothly during shift changes, they generate unique work orders to document items and log any outstanding items or issues. The team also uses Nuvolo to perform technical inspections—they work through digital checklists, ensuring critical equipment and areas are operational and there are no irregularities. Additionally, when everything is tracked in one place, the team can better see where their resources are being deployed. For example, they can spot if they are unexpectedly spending a lot of time on preventive or corrective maintenance, and they can get insights into whether they need to adjust their maintenance schedules—an activity previously challenging to undertake when using disparate systems. By centralizing all their data, STACK has been able to reduce costs by avoiding duplicate maintenance visits and helping prevent costly failures that could impact business and clients. “We have a better control of the asset lifecycle—from onboarding to retiring,” said Frode Elden Kay, Service Manager, STACK EMEA – Nordics. “In the future, this will be invaluable to advise us when we need to address something, and we can start to see whether we need to adjust a process.” Streamlining Work Order Processes Optimizing digital workflows eliminates the bottlenecks of daily maintenance operations. With Nuvolo, STACK was able to customize and create unique workflows for different work order types. For example, when making certain repairs and fixes, technicians need to first get customer or managerial approval. To address this, the team added reminders and workflows for approval steps within the work order. In addition, the team was able to simplify some work order types, such as those for inspections. This enables the technicians to spend less time entering data and instead focus on more important tasks. Vendor Management Although STACK uses in-house service teams, they also rely on external contractors for their locations in Sweden. Before Nuvolo, these external technicians used a separate system and relied on a manual process in which local management had to print out hard copies of work orders. With no centralized information, this also made it difficult for management to follow up and see how teams were performing against expectations. Now, the external technicians use the same platform that the in-house team uses. That way, everyone is working in one system, and vendors can save time and get real-time access to the information they need in order to fix issues or perform inspections. It is also easier for management teams to get status updates on critical issues and see how vendors are performing. Consistent and Accurate Data STACK worked with the Nuvolo team to customize the solution and further extend ServiceNow. For example, STACK has been able to simplify processes, such as incidents and change management requests, by synchronizing data held within the single ServiceNow database—thereby increasing the consistency and accuracy of the data. Future Plans The STACK Nordic team is looking to grow their usage of Nuvolo as they continue to scale up and build new sites. “We’re rapidly expanding, so it will be key to have control over assets and work order management in Nuvolo,” said Frode. “Since the tool is customizable, it is scalable and gives us the advantage to have control over the process. I can take a step back and I don’t have to focus on the small details. I can look at the bigger picture and adjust things going forward, as well.” With Nuvolo, the team can streamline their facilities processes and get better insights into asset and vendor performance—simplifying the complex, critical process of managing the maintenance of their data center solutions. Interested in learning more? Read about using Connected Workplace for data centers, and watch a video about how Nuvolo can help you maximize uptime and asset reliability for your data centers. Share
