About the client 

A large enterprise IT organization (identity and sector withheld) that had run ServiceNow for many years. Its hardware estate spanned end-user computing, servers, storage, network gear and data-center equipment, distributed across many physical sites and stockrooms. Over time the platform had accumulated custom asset management: duplicate hardware models, custom fields shadowing standard ones, retirement processes that differed by device type, and inventory records that had drifted from the physical world. 

The organization engaged ValueCentrix to replace that customization with licensed ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management Pro capability. The program ran 16 capability streams in parallel across 20 two-week sprints and 15 production releases over roughly eight months, absorbed a platform upgrade mid-program without breaking cadence, and delivered 100% of committed scope into production. 

The situation 

The platform carried a long tail of custom fields duplicating what HAM Pro now provided natively: a custom device type, lifecycle field, location type, end-of-life date and verification status; a bespoke normalization tab; and a business rule running against tables where its target field did not exist. Each was a barrier to upgrade and a source of divergence between what the system reported and what the product was designed to do. None could simply be deleted, because any of them might be feeding a notification, an integration or a downstream flow. 

What we did 

• Traced every consumer of each candidate field before touching it: scheduled jobs, notification scripts, business rules, integrations and catalog workflows. 

• Confirmed with the platform and integration teams that no external consumer depended on the field, and recorded that confirmation in the story before proceeding. 

• Where a custom rule was executing incorrectly, deactivated it rather than patching it, returning behavior to product standard instead of maintaining a corrected customization. 

• Applied fix scripts to normalize the resulting data across the full hardware and consumable model estate. 

• For the one change with genuine CMDB risk, agreed a joint observation window with the configuration management team and a pre-defined rollback position before deploying. 

  
  

Outcomes 

• Seven custom fields retired or returned to product standard and verified in production. 

• Out-of-the-box asset states that had previously been removed were restored, disabled in the choice list and documented, so the capability exists if the business needs it later. 

• Auditing enabled on model number, category, name and manufacturer, making changes by the normalization service traceable instead of invisible.