Transurban transforms its visitor management experience

Transurban has overhauled its visitor management experience, replacing an end-of-life platform with one made by ServiceNow that also acts as a foundation for a wider workspace service delivery strategy.

The toll road operator’s enterprise platform manager Sanjeev Kalia told ServiceNow World Forum Sydney that the initial trigger for the overhaul was the looming end-of-life of its existing visitor management system.

“It was cumbersome to use, increasingly difficult to manage and naturally made our expectations from a modern workspace experience, so we thought it’s a good time to replace it with something that’s more scalable, reliable and user friendly,” Kalia said.

“Beyond simply replacing a piece of technology, we wanted to overhaul the entire visitor management experience, from the moment a visitor receiving an invite for a meeting, to them arriving at a kiosk, to their check in and check out at the time of departure, and we also wanted to bake in security, governance and compliance requirements into the platform, and not leave it as an afterthought.”

Head of service management and IT operations Shawn Srivastava said the new platform needed to handle “visitor pre-registration, badge management, health notifications, reporting and seamless integration with our existing workplace .. technologies that we have Teams, our SMS gateway, [and] Cisco for network authentication.”

The company has used ServiceNow in the IT space for close to a decade, and elected to expand it by taking up the vendor’s visitor management system.

It engaged KPMG as a delivery partner, and the project was delivered in about seven weeks.

“I think the benefit of choosing ServiceNow was that it was already quite well embedded within the business,” Kalia said.

“We saw an opportunity to extend ServiceNow beyond the traditional IT workflows into a workspace service delivery [platform].

“[That] allowed us to leverage an existing technology that employees were comfortable with, already using, and that was quite well supported within the organisation.”

Srivastava said that since deploying the new system, “the visitor journey is now much more streamlined and consistent.”

“Visitors can now do pre-registration, come into our offices, collect their badges, the host gets automated notification as well, and [the] facilities [team] have a really clear view of the list of activities across all our locations,” he said.

“We’re using the same process across all our locations. That’s from an operations perspective.

“From a technology perspective we are now using a much more modern enterprise platform … that puts us in a really good spot in terms of the innovation that’s happening on the ServiceNow platform from an AI or automation perspective.”

Kalia said the platform is intended to be the “foundation for a wider workspace service delivery strategy”.

“It’s put us in the right spot ready for any future workplace initiatives,” he said.

“We’re going to keep on enhancing this experience for our visitors and for our employees in general, leveraging the wider workspace service delivery capabilities, and obviously the platform’s native AI capabilities.”

The company has already started to implement Now Assist, ServiceNow’s main AI offering, in the IT space.

“Over the past 12 months or so we’ve been on this journey of rolling out Now Assist’s IT [capabilities] within the instance as a part of which we’ve rolled out numerous AI skills, AI agents, agentic workflows and also uplifted our virtual agent experience,” Kalia said.

“Having the visitor management system on the same platform just allows us to extend that innovation and lessons to wider workspace service delivery use cases.”

Ry Crozier attended ServiceNow World Forum Sydney as a guest of ServiceNow.