Work Hacker: Cars.com

We humans have become quite adept at modifying and upgrading tools and machines to make our lives easier.  Consider the car enthusiast who goes under the hood to add more horsepower.  Or the video gamer who opens the PC to install more memory and a new graphics card. And now we’re starting to move beyond just tinkering with individual systems to overhauling entire business processes.  Today’s Work Hackers replace manual tasks with applications to accelerate the way we work. The case of how the IT organization at Cars.com - not satisfied with the status quo - saved thousands of man-hours across multiple departments is an excellent example of this new breed of Work Hacker. 

Cars.com is the leading online destination for automobile and truck shoppers.  More than 31 million consumers visit every month for help making their buying decisions. 

Like many enterprises, Cars.com relied on spreadsheets to manage and maintain IT data.  These were often stored in a central repository like Microsoft (News - Alert) SharePoint.  But users struggled to maintain version control and find specific pieces of information.  As a result, users’ collaboration and productivity levels fell. 

“We had so many tools in place for just IT service management,” said April Carter, IT Operations Manager at Cars.com. “That meant our processes were siloed and disjointed.  It was also difficult to report on incidents or changes from a corporate perspective.”

Cars.com partnered with ServiceNow (News - Alert) to create a single system of record for IT to meet two goals:

• Provide IT with better visibility and control over information as it moves across the network.
• Automate other departments' work processes.

First up: Facilities Management

Previously, the facilities team logged incidents into software, but the information was not accessible from a mobile device. They would have to wait to get back to their desk to see that “a conference room is too hot or there is a problem with a rest room, and it was two hours ago,” reflects Carter.

The IT team created a ‘work hack’ – a custom application on the platform to track incidents and requests in real-time.

“Now they carry around their phones and watch their queue. They are never at their desks. They are facilities. They are running around fixing things. They are getting a great response on how much more quickly they are addressing issues around the office.  Each engineer can resolve around 100 tickets a month, well above the previous average of 40. 

Taking on HR

Making the employee onboarding process more efficient was another priority. Cars.com is growing, which means a steady stream of new employees need workstations, computers, email accounts, security credentials, telephones, information on benefits selection, etc. 

That process used to rely on manually updating spreadsheets and managing strings of emails, creating difficult-to-manage workloads for HR and IT.

The IT team created a new onboarding app that automatically launches a workflow to handle all necessary approvals across all relevant users and departments. Without having to necessitate a last minute fire drill, computers can be procured and provisioned appropriately, the new person added to Active Directory and email enabled with proper access to distribution lists and share drives.

Eighty percent of these processes are now automated, saving more than 1,000 hours a year for IT and about 300 hours for HR. 

The company's Work Hacker efforts are on-going. Carter says that often entails helping other users replace their reliance on spreadsheets and SharePoint with a single platform for automating their specific workflows. 

“Any time you can get a group process away from a spreadsheet it is a good thing,” she adds. “It gives us the chance to think through how work actually gets done differently. The less we have to do of the more trivial tasks, the better.”