ServiceNow S2P Leads to Procurement Transformation at Gaming Publisher

Sourcing and procurement for your organization,  ensuring your company has all of the goods and services your team needs to do their jobs,  involves synchronizing a slew of moving parts from sourcing orchestration and requisition to approvals and making sure your team is showing receipts. Diving even deeper into source-to-pay (S2P), you get into supplier engagement, accounts payable automation, and case management, which spans across all S2P activities. 

S2P feels complex and vital because it involves everything that supports daily operations.

The challenge for modern S2P strategy is that, over time, programmatic sourcing and procurement involve a wealth of transactions (for a large retailer with lots of shelves, that can be tens of thousands weekly). Even more, those transactions often require more work than necessary for organizations. 

Enterprises make significant investments in procurement, including ERPs like Oracle or SAP and indirect procurement systems like Coupa and Ariba, depending on the industry. Every system touching vendor onboarding, vendor security, vendor analysis, RFP, third-party risk management, and more plays a role in procurement. These systems are designed to optimize a transaction flow or process flow, but they are disconnected and don’t account for the nuances of how business units work across organizations.

This is where ServiceNow steps in. The technology isn’t necessarily going to replace all those systems. But it does drive additional value out of procurement systems by making them more effective through approvals, task management, work orchestration, visibility, and user experience.

Putting ServiceNow in place as a central hub facilitates implementing an efficient source-to-pay process. The platform can standardize work and tasks as well as facilitate collaboration, an activity which typically relies on lengthy process documents, emails exchanges, and other organizational knowledge to traverse silos within an organization.

Taking Those First S2P Steps

This case study covers a ServiceNow S2P phase one implementation at a leading game publisher with many popular brands to its name. The company had been substantially growing through acquisitions, and its sourcing and procurement process was very decentralized. This meant a lack of visibility into its procurement process, which made it difficult to manage spending, and acquisitions meant no standardized process. People requesting procurement services faced an arduous process that wasn’t user-friendly and required many manual tasks across the organization.

The game publisher executed the S2P phase one project with a focus on creating a great user experience for requisitions and visibility throughout the procurement process for transactions. Phase one took about four months, running from late 2024 to March 2025.

Centralizing Procurement With a Bespoke Employee-Centric Portal

The phase one business goal was creating a great, dynamic user experience for requesters by getting them out of the business of entering purchase orders and other procurement details into an ERP system and transferring those requests to a centralized procurement team with the ability to orchestrate activities across business units for new goods and services requests.

The company had layers of procurement needs, including media services, facilities-related services, and more, and there was a need to track and group S2P within the company’s brands and even within specific projects being launched within individual brands.

The larger goal looked at the company on a global basis, being able to centralize the procurement process to bring all its independently operating business units under a single S2P umbrella.

For phase one, the CoreX team created a multi-entity, procurement-focused, dynamic guided user experience portal in ServiceNow’s Employee Center that encapsulated governance into a technical solution. This tool had rules and guidelines built in, which standardized the sourcing and procurement process regardless of which part of the organization was using the dynamic guided workspace, and handled governance under the hood so users didn’t have to understand, or even know, procurement rules to stay within organizational guidelines.

Essentially, CoreX created a process improvement with a requirement of category-driven questions interlaced with project-centric tracking to facilitate a transparent sourcing and procurement process. This allowed for procurement visibility over requests and visibility over what’s happening in the procurement process, including details like: Has this vendor been approved? Have they been onboarded? Has a purchase order been created?

Previously, these basic questions were answered through email communication back and forth. With the ServiceNow workspace in place, everyone had visibility throughout the process.

The full phase one process included:

• Creation of the dynamic guided user experience.
• Implementing the dedicated workspaces for sourcing and procurement teams with 360 visibility to requestors throughout the process.

The new workspace orchestrated work across business units from IT and legal to vendor onboarding. And it took a transaction or request for new goods or services through the entire lifecycle of approval, contracts, PO issuance, and ultimately to the user, making it easy to receive those products or services and see that the information gets put back into the ERP system for proper transaction processing.

All of this helped prepare the company to take a further step into automating some of its procurement processes.

Building the Foundation to Track Results

Because the company was so decentralized, it was focused on improving its procurement metrics and visibility into its transactions. One aspect of the S2P phase one project with CoreX was beginning to understand and track KPIs like improving spend under management through implementing requisition best practices, and providing visibility into procurement teams.

Another metric would be optimizing operational time spent by the procurement team supporting the entire organization, and a third metric would be an improved net promoter score or employee satisfaction rating because of the easier-to-use S2P process.

Overall, phase one led to three key outcomes:

1. New and improved procurement user experience
2. Vastly improved organizational visibility for all stakeholders
3. Scaled operations through work orchestration

What might be the most telling outcome of the phase one effort is that the company went from a very decentralized, manual procurement process to bringing in ServiceNow and a bespoke procurement portal. That taste of what ServiceNow can do led the company to ask, “We didn’t realize ServiceNow could do this for us. Can it also do these other things?”

In response, the gaming publisher has become a very active ServiceNow user and continues to extend the platform to drive value across the organization.

Looking towards phase two, the next step in the partnership between the gaming publisher and CoreX will be a global rollout of ServiceNow S2P with enhancements around specific categories like IT and media purchasing, implementing third-party catalog punchouts, and adding bespoke ServiceNow processes such as security assessments, third-party risk, and more. And, ultimately, AI-guided experiences.

Two standout elements of the entire ServiceNow S2P phase one project were simply the speed of the project – four months from start to finish was an exceptional time to value for the company – and how using ServiceNow as a transformational tool or agent provided such significant savings in both time and money over other platforms.

Applying ServiceNow to business processes, like sourcing and procurement, is vastly more agile than other enterprise systems in terms of time and functional capability.