A UK national utilities operator cut shared-equipment loss and damage across distributed field operations.
Delivered with Velocity Smart Collect® running natively inside the operator's ServiceNow platform — for field engineering and shared-equipment workflows.
Two customer-confirmed results.
Each measured by the customer against their own pre-Velocity baseline.
A UK national utilities operator.
A UK national utilities operator running field engineering and shared-equipment workflows across distributed operations, with ServiceNow standardised for enterprise IT service management.
Where national utilities IT runs into a shared-equipment loss problem.
National utilities operators face a particular shared-equipment problem. Field engineering teams routinely pick up shared kit — diagnostic equipment, test instruments, laptops, peripherals — for use on customer-site work, with the expectation that the equipment returns to a known location at the end of the shift. In practice, equipment goes missing, gets damaged, or ends up in the wrong place. Replacement costs compound over time.
The audit requirement layers on top: regulated infrastructure environments require evidence of who used what equipment, where, and when. Manual sign-out systems struggle to produce that evidence reliably.
Why shared-equipment loss isn't really an equipment problem.
The traditional approach — manual sign-out logs, lockable cupboards, asset spreadsheets — fails because it treats loss as an inventory problem rather than a workflow problem. Equipment doesn't go missing because there's nowhere to put it. It goes missing because the workflow that gets it into the field doesn't have an audit-grade record of who took it, when, or for what purpose.
What national utilities IT needs is a handover workflow where every shared-equipment movement is a first-class ServiceNow record from the moment it leaves storage.
Smart Collect® treating shared equipment as a tracked ServiceNow asset.
The operator deployed Velocity Smart Collect® as a ServiceNow scoped application running natively inside the platform. Smart Lockers handled shared-equipment checkout and return, with every transaction operating as a first-class ServiceNow record — tied to the engineer's identity, the job ticket, and the asset record automatically.
For field engineering workflows, the architecture mattered. Every checkout updated the CMDB; every return reconciled against the original loan record. Missing or overdue equipment surfaced immediately in ServiceNow rather than weeks later in an inventory audit.
The result was a sharp reduction in shared-equipment loss and damage, instant SLA on equipment delivery to field engineering teams, and a complete audit trail that satisfies the operator's regulated-environment compliance requirements.
The hardware platform is already in place. The AI layer activates on top of it.
As ServiceNow's Now Assist and agentic ITSM mature, the same Smart Collect® workflows that cut shared-equipment loss by 90% become accessible to AI agents — meaning equipment allocation and return tracking can run with zero human-in-the-loop. The hardware platform is already in place; the AI layer activates on top of it.
Want to see what Smart Collect® could do for your IT operation?
A 60-minute discovery workshop maps your hardware-request volumes, regulated-site requirements, and ServiceNow architecture — and sizes the throughput uplift available to you.