Hy-Vee advanced ITSM and saved 100+ downtime hours per year with Jira Service Management Cloud

A top grocer shops for a new solution to support digital transformation

As one of the most popular grocers in America, Hy-Vee is on a fast trajectory of growth. The brand is on a mission to move beyond the Midwest (where they have over 300 stores and over 75,000 employees) to become the best place to shop and work in America. 

To reach this ambition, Hy-Vee launched a digital and cultural transformation initiative around 2017. In the first five years of their transformation, the company’s teams made impressive progress with Jira and Confluence powering their work, including launching mobile checkout and online immunization scheduling to help customers save money and time.

The need for innovation only grew during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent period of high inflation, when employees and customers demanded more digital solutions and cost savings. Subsequently, Hy-Vee faced a difficult decision: accelerate their digital transformation and find new ways to cut costs, or potentially lose money, people, and market share. 

With so much pride in their employee-owned company, Hy-Vee’s teams banded together to speed up the journey and save millions through a variety of process improvements, including expanding their Jira Service Management solution and migrating to Atlassian cloud. 

With Jira Service Management, new cloud capabilities, and far less maintenance to do, Hy-Vee has helped departments across the company make impactful changes for their teams and customers. In addition to eliminating thousands of emails and phone calls, improving visibility for better decision-making, increasing efficiency, and making employees’ lives easier today, teams are now better equipped to make continuous improvements on their journey to become America’s best place to shop and work.

A supermarket chain seizes the opportunity to go super modern

Hy-Vee has always had talented, passionate team members, but several internal support challenges were holding them back from being more efficient and effective:

1. Service requests were managed by phone and email. 

Without a centralized place to submit or manage requests, response times were lagging, and requests would sometimes fall through the cracks. It was also nearly impossible to track ticket statuses or measure performance. 

2. Support Services staff were bogged down by server maintenance for Hy-Vee’s on-premise tools.

Server updates required taking systems down over the weekend multiple times each year and manually managing tickets via email during downtime. This was not only tedious for IT, but also took resources away from more valuable work.

3. There was no infrastructure to support incident management.

When incidents arose, Hy-Vee didn’t have a formal or fast way to track them, respond, implement fixes, or document learnings to prevent similar issues in the future.  

Responsible for supporting all employees across retail locations, corporate offices, distribution centers, and subsidiaries, the Hy-Vee Support Services team knew that modernizing service management was necessary to achieve the company's digital transformation goals. They sought the help of another Atlassian solution to begin tackling these challenges and more. 

“For anything that’s being tracked via email, move it to Jira Service Management!”

Implementing Jira Service Management and migrating to the cloud solved these three challenges and more. 

Hy-Vee had used OpenText for ITSM in the past, but because the tool was highly technical and not user friendly, admins had to rely on their vendor for help making updates. Director of Support Services Christa Nitchals and her team turned to Jira Service Management for a more robust, flexible solution that would be easier for admins to self-manage and meet users’ increasingly complex needs. 

Support Services piloted the tool by building two basic intake forms to gather more information upfront from requesters and manage each ticket in a central place instead of via email or phone. 

Filling the “cart” with new ways to manage changes, incidents, and knowledge

Seeing the time savings and service improvements Support Services delivered with just two forms, Christa’s motto became, “For anything that’s being tracked via email, move it to Jira Service Management!” Over time, Hy-Vee began to roll out more ITSM practices with Jira Service Management, including change, incident, and knowledge management.

“From a support standpoint, having Jira Service Management means we can make consistent updates to improve our processes, such as implementing a major incident process, adding new details to customer forms to collect better information upfront, and quickly creating forms for upcoming projects, which also allows us to better track metrics,” Christa explains.

Today, Hy-Vee uses the solution to manage over 130,000 tickets every year across their organization and spot opportunities for optimization. “We’re constantly trying to improve our processes, and that’s easy to do with Jira Service Management,” Christa says. 

One such process that has been improved is incident management. Before Jira Service Management, there wasn’t a formal way to report, track, or resolve incidents. For instance, whenever a Hy-Vee convenience store’s gas pumps would go offline, the store’s manager would have to call Support Services. Every minute the pumps were down meant hundreds of dollars lost. 

Since Hy-Vee Support Services implemented Jira Service Management for incident management and new monitoring processes, they can now proactively identify equipment issues, respond faster, and track trends to minimize recurrences. 

In addition to implementing a major incident process, escalation response times are improving now that Jira Service Management is in place. “Our Support Services Team now does daily incident reviews and knows that tickets need to either be addressed, escalated, or closed and a new ticket created,” Christa explains. “Even if we can’t resolve the issue, we need to keep our customers in the loop. Jira Service Management reinforces accountability and communication with our customers.” 

Process improvements spread across the enterprise

After seeing how much Jira Service Management helped Support Services, other teams began reaching out for help setting up Jira Service Management for their own process improvements, such as managing requests for vendor support and renewals, equipment purchasing, pulling video footage from retail locations for loss prevention, and more. The HR team saw incredible value in using Jira Service Management for their HR information system, and Finance realized the solution presented a great opportunity to optimize their budget request process. 

Vice President of Finance Kyle Auffert says the Finance team’s budget approval workflow has “taken off.” Like many other types of requests, purchases were previously approved by phone or email. However, stakeholders would often lose track of tickets, and it was difficult to track status or collaborate on requests. Now, employees can submit budget requests through Jira Service Management, and they are routed to the right person for approval. Approvers get twice-weekly emails that summarize all requests in one message, and they can approve with one click from any device. Then, the ticket is routed to the right person for fulfillment. 

Better data paves the way for visualization and value

With all of the company’s tickets centralized in one ecosystem, Hy-Vee now has visibility into more robust, accurate data that couldn’t be tracked before, helping technical and non-technical teams make more informed decisions, balance workloads, manage staffing, reduce tickets, and accelerate response times. For example, by tracking metrics like “percentage of tickets over 14 days old” and “number of escalated tickets,” Support Services can intentionally work on reducing those numbers – an effort that simply wouldn’t have been possible before. In addition, developers and admins can link tickets to Jira issues and Confluence pages to quickly find more information without manually switching tools. 

Migrating to the cloud unlocks even better experiences

Christa says employees are enjoying Jira Service Management even more since migrating to the cloud. “The native forms in Jira Service Management Cloud look so much better. There are a lot more customization options, and we can control the logic to make them dynamic,” Christa explains. “Plus, we don’t have to worry about maintenance or taking servers down for the whole weekend multiple times a year to do updates.” 

The Support Services Team has also enjoyed taking advantage of cloud-only features that help them elevate their solution and save even more time. For example, using the Jira Service Management chat feature for conversational support, the team can save time by capturing, assigning, tracking, managing, and reporting on requests directly in Slack.

All of these improvements are just the beginning. Hy-Vee’s ideas – and the opportunities to bring them to life with Jira Service Management – are endless. 

A helpful smile in every aisle

Digital and cultural transformations are long journeys that require having the right people, platforms, and processes in place. Hy-Vee has always been known for their talented, friendly people, and now their teams are equipped with better collaboration platforms and service management processes to support their work. 

Hy-Vee’s tagline is “A Helpful Smile in Every Aisle.” With the help of Jira Service Management Cloud and their entire Atlassian ecosystem, America’s favorite grocer is transforming the employee experience to see just as many smiles from staff as they do from shoppers.