Duke: All right, Corey, what are we talking about today?
CJ: Oh, duke.
Today we are talking with the good folks from Serenity, EHS,
Duke: The very good folks at Serenity EHS.
We have with us , Nathan Duperrac and Peter Onepo.
Oh, damn it.
It's like we're over a hundred episodes and I still like, I
just want one perfect intro one.
All right.
Well, welcome to the show guys.
So good to have you here.
I would love for you guys to introduce yourself and then introduce Serenity.
So, Peter, why don't you go first?
Peter: Yeah, sure.
, I'm Peter Onepo.
I've been in the ServiceNow ecosystem since 2009.
, most recently I am the co founder and CEO of Serendity EHS.
And we have a fantastic EHS solution for the ServiceNow Pipeline.
Nathan: similar to Peter, I've worked in the ServiceNow ecosystem since
2014, , primarily in product management.
And then I, uh, I joined the Serenity team actually just one
year ago, so I'm officially just past my one year anniversary.
CJ: Nice.
Duke: A lot of people in service now are focused around the ITSM side of the house.
, the product does continue to grow and grow and grow.
But for those who don't know, , tell us what EHS means in the Serenity EHS title.
Peter: EHS stands for environmental health and safety.
Sometimes you'll see it as HSE, or there's a couple of other
different, , variations of that.
And effectively it is focused on making sure that your employees are,
healthy and safe while they're working.
And so that can be a little bit different based on the industry, but effectively
the, point of it is especially if you're interacting with machinery or doing
a task that you could get hurt, how do you track are people getting hurt?
How did we help them?
And then ultimately, how do we prevent that from happening in the future?
So there's a lot of like investigative work.
putting together action plans to correct a problem, to prevent
it from happening in the future.
our software tackles all of that, and we try to put it right next to all the other
things that employees might be dealing with, the traditional ServiceNow stuff,
, I have IT requests, I have HR requests.
Now you can manage that whole EHS solution, right there on
the platform with our software.
, Duke: if people wanted a, like for like, , who would you say you compete with?
Silence.
Peter: those are the big names that are out there and that, we find
ourselves competing with directly.
then there's a bunch of little point solutions that like solve
maybe one part of the problem.
you know, whether it's just, , the EHS incident itself, or maybe if you
have to do like OSHA reporting, right?
So if people get hurt, you have to report it to the government.
, there's solutions for just that piece.
, but when it comes to a comprehensive EHS solution, those are, those
are the big competitors that we're going against right now.
CJ: what made you guys choose to build on service?
Now, you
Peter: We chose to build on top of the service now.
Honestly, a big part of it is because.
It's what we know, but in the 15 years that I've been working with
the platform, EHS had come up a lot.
There were organizations that wanted to put this stuff right
next to their other applications.
So in previous lives, I was both doing implementations and I was on
the sales side at, Service Down.
People would ask how do we put all this stuff together?
And the platform creates.
That ability to do engagement with employees, which is a big
problem in the HS space too.
So there's a lot of alignment between what customers are asking for the individual
problems that they calling out and our capability to deliver solutions, , on
the platform that met that, but also the time to value was huge, right?
So, we could be up and running.
an app with a first customer in a very short period of time.
And then we can do deployments very quickly.
And so this meant that our customers are able to solve these problems.
They're able to do it in a comprehensive way.
They're able to get that employee engagement, , on the service now
platform, and for us, we could do it very quickly and efficiently, and
we didn't have to build out a whole operations team and, all this stuff
that we didn't want to deal with.
We want to get right to building the app for the customer.
Silence.
Nathan: they're managing, they don't always have the best relationship with I.
T.
I.
T.
is trying to streamline and minimize costs, , and take out some kind
of bespoke, , operations tasks.
And so by being on service now, I know it's, helped in a lot of accounts
to actually smooth the relationships between the business users and E.
H.
S.
and the support teams in I.
T.
, so yeah, to Peter's point, I think it was an initial hypothesis.
We saw that happening in our time at service now in, in other business
domains , and it's continuing to hold true , in EHS as well.
CJ: know, that's interesting.
I think since I've been, , involved in service now, , 1 of the things
that's always stood out to me is how easy it is to build an application
on top of it versus having to build something from scratch.
If you're outside of platform and it always occurred to me that this is a
great platform to build apps, such as this 1, and be able to, , Bootstrap
it a lot easier than say, , having to build out like a platform that
can do dashboards and emailing and, a database to collect the records like
ServiceNow gives you all of that.
And so I can see how it was, a solution, That was appealing for you all, especially
what's your ServiceNow backgrounds.
One of the things that you mentioned.
I just want to, double click on was, you know, you said smooth out the,
relationship with the business and it, , in terms of talking about the
legacy applications that they've, had to utilize, , previously with EHS,
tell me a little bit more about that?
I'd like to, understand a little bit more from the business standpoint, How
much they appreciate the ability to actually have that better relationship
with it, using the nervous now platform.
Nathan: Yeah.
So I think, it gets a little bit into kind of understanding
the, competitive landscape.
, and so as Peter was mentioning earlier.
There's a lot of older platforms like intellects, Gordy, , and
dozens of, point solutions as well.
And they all have their benefits.
They all have their drawbacks.
, some are highly configurable, , but that comes at an expense , of
say user experience.
, and so adoption suffers because users struggle to actually use those solutions.
Then there might be another solution with a great user experience,
but really limited capabilities.
And so.
What ends up happening for those customers.
And we see this really with, every large enterprise we talked to is they've
just kept acquiring, , more point solutions, , additional platforms to
fill the gaps left by the previous one.
, and so with each one of those, there's the maintenance overhead.
There's, even the simple stuff like getting active directory, single sign on
set up and getting HR feeds, , set up.
And so all of that just adds a lot of non value add.
Work, , and ongoing maintenance.
And so what ends up happening is feature requests, , end up falling to
the wayside because the maintenance is taking so many of it's resources.
And so we see that then resulting in frustration where the business wants
something they're being told they can get it maybe in, in two years.
, and so that's, I think started probably years ago and just continues to snowball.
And so, some of the accounts we've talked to just they're blown away
by the speed at which an idea can be turned into a feature and deployed.
, and with the ServiceNow teams at our customers, they feel confident with
things like scoped apps that we can move quickly and deliver those features without
impacting other parts of the platform.
And so.
In the end, we end up seeing that, there's not this, this push and
pull where one team wants something.
The other doesn't it's actually flipped in and both are supportive.
, and we're able to prove that really quickly.
And so that's what I'm most excited about, especially with our enterprise
accounts is having the, buy in from stakeholders on, both sides and knowing
that they all prefer this , over what the previous, , ecosystem looked like,
Duke: I'm just, I'm still stuck on telling people that they can
have their thing in two years.
Nathan: right.
Duke: Like you imagine.
CJ: Yeah.
Duke: I get older, the time tends to go faster, but even now, I
think two years, it might as well be 20 the way the world changes
Nathan: right, yeah, it's so much changes in two years.
, even when we get asked for feature requests and I'm wincing, cause I'm
like, oh, that might take a month.
Duke: a whole
Nathan: and, and when I say, um, when I say that the, customers are
always like, oh yeah, that's fine.
So it's been, refreshing for our customers to hear that.
And it's, it's nice for us , to know that , we're helping and
contributing positively in that way.
Duke: Is there any part of the service now app that has one of
those, this is better together?
Nathan: many.
I think the easiest one to think of is, is HR.
and in some of our, our accounts, primarily the smaller ones, sometimes
EHS does actually roll up into HR.
it's not the most common in, large enterprise.
Where it falls more into the operations team, but there is definitely some
overlap with HR, especially when it comes to OSHA requirements here in the US.
A lot of what ends up feeding into your regulatory reports is data.
That's coming from HR systems.
So you need to know who the employees are.
, you need to know where they live.
You need to know when they started, how long they've been
in the position that they held.
And so a lot of that data, you know, naturally lives , in the HR platforms.
And so , if we're working with a customer whose HR team is already
on service now, that accelerates time to value even further.
I think facilities plays into it as well.
and then I think there's, it's something that we don't see, , quite
as much, but I have to think that.
But things like field service management, and I know that I know the service
now teams have been getting more into enterprise asset management.
Those start to converge with the conversations we have as well, which,
becomes things like inspecting pieces of machinery and pieces of equipment.
and so.
HR is the 1 that we, I would say is, the most obvious fit, but I think there's,
so much more opportunity, even outside of that, , to tell those better together
stories , with other service now products.
CJ: I love that, I'm just going to tie this back to
something that you said earlier.
that really resonated with me as well when we were talking about, , the
ease of use and building on the ServiceNow platform and a lot of
the features that you inherited.
I wasn't thinking about the perspective of you also inherit, , if single
sign on is already HR integration connected to the instance, right?
You already inherit those things.
Okay.
Thanks.
With service now with, your app being built on the service now platform.
And then, there's all of these other things that you just enumerate it, right?
Like, tying directly into maybe asset management , and utilizing, probably
the CMDB probably reporting, right?
Like all of these different things that, the platform goes to offer and,
and, it goes right to a just basically a competitive advantage, right?
By built by being built on the service now platform.
Nathan: Yeah.
Time to value is the one I constantly focus on.
, every one of those integrations, they might not be technically difficult,
but if you're, , an enterprise, there's different stakeholders that you have
to align and have the conversations.
And so optimistically, each integration takes a week.
, that's super optimistic.
And, add each one of those integrations and all you're doing is
adding to . Your deployment timeline.
And so it's great that , for customers, especially those
highly adopted on service.
Now we can cut those timelines significantly.
, and I think time to value , is ultimately what , the EHS teams want.
Peter: Yeah, and it goes back to that question about how do
we work with it teams as well.
And this is a story that resonates, I think, on both sides of that equation.
, because you have IT team needs to support EHS and if EHS in a lot
of cases, they'll actually have.
Two or three of our competitors, because not one of them does everything well.
And so it is now supporting these three different platforms
because it supports platforms.
So , when we come in and we say the plan isn't to add a new agent, EHS
platform, the plan is to remove these.
Other two or three, put this one in place on the platform you already own.
And now we can cut a lot of the talking about the tactics and the details of
what's being deployed and start talking a little bit more strategically.
Like what are the outcomes you're not seeing today because you're so busy
trying to You know, upgrade porty and make sure that that integration doesn't
break with single sign on like , we're already up and running and past that
in a quarter of the time that, a lot of our competitors are in place.
And so that's, why the service now story plus EHS helps a lot and then
one of the things you were talking about, CJ, is it is very easy to build
on the platform, but what can happen with that is it's a double edged
sword because you can build it doesn't necessarily mean you should build it.
And so that's where that's where having a pre built application
with guardrails in place helps simplify that conversation down.
So I'm not going to pretend that our solution solves every
problem for every enterprise, but if we can come in and take.
The baseline out and say, that's solved.
Now you can really focus in on, , maybe you need a custom feature that
belongs just to you because your manufacturing process is bespoke.
And you can actually do that now because you've gotten rid of
all the red tape that comes with trying to manage three platforms.
And now you've got Serenity on service now, and then you add this additional
feature and, it just opens up the door, I think for our customers to do a lot more.
Duke: Do you find that most of your customers , have EHS
solutions that they are replacing?
Or is it companies that are now getting to the point where it's like, Hey,
listen, we need tools behind this.
Nathan: I'd say it's both.
, so at the highest level, I group our customers into 2 buckets in
the enterprise space, especially with manufacturing and oil and gas.
Construction, the historically, , have always been dangerous jobs.
They've had, programs in place.
Rarely do we, we see them have one solution.
Like I was saying, they, have multiple solutions that they've
acquired over the last decade or two.
, and so they're looking , to replace all of those, , or a large percentage
of those with a single platform.
, so that's really common for our, our larger customers.
, but then on the other end of the spectrum, there's a really untapped
market, , that we've, found with midsize and even smaller shops where they're
still in, in Google sheets, they're on Excel docs, they're on SharePoint sites.
, and so what they're looking for is, is a structured workflow.
They want to streamline their reporting.
They're interested in, adding intelligence to their very small teams.
, and so we've been focusing and asking ourselves, are there ways that we can
bring these capabilities down market?
, in a meaningful way to really just get them off , of flat files into something
that, that is modern, intuitive and, really accelerates their, EHS programs.
Duke: You're basically making these, the stuff that was maybe
priced out for most people.
And bringing that power to those, , small, medium sized enterprise.
Nathan: Yeah.
And priced out for two reasons.
So one, the, the legacy platforms, they are expensive, , just from
a subscription perspective.
, but they're also, there's big services, , S.
O.
W.
S.
that, that tag along with are already, they're already high costs.
And so, as we look to that market and we see that there's this need
and they, they have limited options.
, we want to be a more affordable option, not, , just from the licensing
perspective, but also , the implementation and , the ongoing maintenance and support.
Duke: So , I'm looking on your website and under your product section, I see
there's seven or eight different products.
Are these like separate scoped apps on service now, or are they
just, components of a single app that you're either on or off?
Peter: it's a combination of both what you see on the website is
a reflection of what outcomes a stakeholder might be trying to get.
And then in terms of how we deliver that technically.
a significant portion of what we do is, is all effectively in one scoped app,
but , we've separated out a few things.
CJ: so
Peter: And there's, that's more of a, a technical conversation.
So if you take a look at it, we're trying to balance how do we
deliver outcomes for stakeholders who aren't necessarily technical?
And in fact, in the EHS world, that's one of the things that.
I think has been a little bit different over my past dealing
with IT and ITSM, right?
Is you have to talk about things a little bit differently.
And so it's kind of reflected in that our marketing is delivering
outcomes for our stakeholders and then how we deliver that technically,
, everything is within a scoped app.
The question is whether or not there might be a couple of different
modules in the same scoped app.
And we present that differently to the stakeholder.
Yeah.
Duke: There's an obligatory conversation.
We have to have Corey.
I don't know if you notice, but on on their website, they got that serenity.
A.
I
CJ: Oh man, that was my next.
Duke: gotta go there.
Gotta go.
Peter: Yeah.
So there, there's a couple of things that are changing and this is tying
back to, you've got EHS people who aren't necessarily technologists, right?
They've maybe come up through the ranks.
, they were, , in manufacturing or they were, on the, working on gas lines or
whatever, and they've worked their way up and they understand technology and they
understand the benefits, but they don't necessarily understand all the specifics.
And so what we're trying to do is.
Open that up for them to be able to use it without having to dig too deep
in like, Oh, yeah, we can build out an integration with chat gpt or we
can Tap into something else for you.
And so what we've done is we've looked for specific use cases where customers
might be able to leverage AI, and we've, built those, we've baked those out a lot
deeper than maybe just an integration.
So, for example, we have an inspections application.
And so if you're trying to come up with a template, like I need
to go inspect something to make sure it's safe before I use it.
Right.
And this is a new piece of equipment, or I don't have an inspection.
I can go out and I can ask.
AI to help me build this out.
And it's been working fantastically.
Our customers are very excited about it that a lot of them have
some inspection templates that they can already pull in, but even then,
like maybe they want to update them.
And so that's just one example of us being able to tap into the power of AI.
And we're looking for other places to plug that into our platform.
So , it's not a generic utility.
It's very specifically for, , different use cases.
And we bake that out for them.
CJ: Yeah, I love that.
, I'm going to tie what you just said to something that I got
from, conversation around.
One of the previous topic, right?
And it's, the serenity AI ties back into, , the market ties and outcomes in terms of
like how you presented it previously about being able to, , help customers that.
Couldn't otherwise, , for your competitors, right?
Because they are more expensive that they, because they require more
work and more people to maintain and utilize and things like that.
Right?
So it seems like the entire serenity, , sweet, right?
Like is, is really aligned towards creating the best outcomes
from your, for your customers.
But , would you guys feel like that's one of your best selling points?
Nathan: I think the accessibility, not only of the, technology, but the
accessibility of the EHS expertise, , and making that accessible, not
only to the EHS folks, but really to anyone in, in the company.
is one of the big benefits, , , and value points with what Serenity AI is doing.
, I think just like one example, you know, we look at our customers, maybe
on, day one, they want to import some of their historical, data, which
is, is often big lists of corrective preventative actions that are assigned
to the business to, implement.
, and what we see in, in a lot of those is , the instructions of
what they need to do are a sentence or 2 and not very descriptive.
And so if I'm not an EHS person, I don't know what that means.
I don't necessarily know what I need to do to resolve, say, a safety hazard.
, and with, with AI, what we're able to do is with a simple.
A couple word prompt that the EHS person enters can supplement that with
detailed implementation instructions, , for the folks out in the field
who actually have to implement it.
And so that's been a huge value driver.
And one of our customers, that's exactly what they said is I see this
valuable, to our team, to an extent, but we're already smart in this area.
, but what they were most excited about, and this was a manufacturing
company is just being able to.
Educate and use the tool to enable everyone and not just
those who have studied and trained and worked in EHS for decades.
CJ: Yeah, I just think that's so cool, right?
Like I just unlocking the ability for more people to, , access that knowledge, right.
And to be able to utilize the platform for me, it's just, I think every process,
, deserves that level of, , accessibility.
Nathan: 100%.
Yeah.
Duke: So, , I imagine there's some people that are very, very
interested in exploring this further.
I know you have several different outcomes that you support, but do you
have kind of a general idea of what the Serenity implementation looks like?
Nathan: I can touch on that a little bit.
, So being that we are a ServiceNow store partner, , we do have a
traditional implementation model.
So it would be really familiar to what large enterprises that already
have a ServiceNow deployment.
So.
In line with what they have come to expect.
And so our apps, they are available on the service now store.
, we have an implementation team in house that works with our customers.
, does workshops identifies if there's any configuration or
customization needs to those apps.
, and so we do have an in house implementation team for that.
, a lot of really great service now experts on that team.
but we are releasing quarterly to the service now store.
And so, we are constantly enhancing, improving the product,
making those releases available.
, but like every other service now app, , the customer has full control
on if they want to take an upgrade when they want to take that upgrade.
, and so that, that is pretty standard.
there is another implementation, , mechanism that, that is really
new to us and it's something I'm personally really excited for.
, and this one targets more of those midsize customers that we were talking about.
for example, we have a waste management customer, , I think there are about a
thousand employees, so smaller company, , they don't have service now, , But
they are interested , in automating and, digitizing , their EHS program.
And so what we have for them actually is, is something that we are
referring to as Serenity Base Camp.
, and that's a ServiceNow instance that, that we actually , are operating.
, but we make that available to.
Really anyone.
So service now is not a kind of must have before talking to serenity.
If, you're interested in serenity EHS and our capabilities, we have
a mechanism to make that available.
And so that's something I'm really excited about.
, it's.
It's live now.
We have customers.
It's also giving us the ability to do things like free trials.
, , give folks access to the system and try it out for a period of time.
, and within the coming weeks, we're actually going to get to a
point where we can put a, put a sign up button on our website and
anyone can come to SerenityEHS.
com.
Register and start using the product, , without, , having , to
be a ServiceNow customer already.
And so we have an option really for everyone.
Most mature ServiceNow shops to, to the smaller shops that, don't have ServiceNow.
, CJ: this one resonates a lot with me.
I've had this idea of being able to do something like that on service
now platform , for years now, and to hear you guys executing
on it is just so mind blowing.
I might hit you up later to talk to you about , how you accomplish that.
But I just think it's great because.
The ServiceNow platform shouldn't just be limited to folks to
happen, to have , the luxury of having, signed up for it, right?
Like when you, when you start to build apps that are this valuable, right, and
this useful, it's great to be able to.
You know, offer them to anyone, right?
Folks, because they're folks who are using EHS might not
necessarily be using service.
Now, maybe they don't have, you know, a hugely mature, like, you
know, , process and believe the EHS is their bread and butter.
Right?
And, , yeah, this is just amazing.
It's this great.
Nathan: we're really excited.
I know this is where I get a little more kind of technically excited about things.
, It allows us to, to experiment more, , with those kinds of customers so we can.
Test out a new feature, , introduce it, get feedback quickly, make
changes, , we're constantly updating that environment.
So it's not a quarterly release cycle.
It's a, as quickly as we need to release cycle.
, so we learn a lot and can feed that back into the product.
And it ultimately benefits our enterprise customers.
And likewise, we can take feedback from our enterprise customers, , build
those new features, release them to, to our, base camp customers, , and make
sure that , they're right, , before we release them back to enterprise.
So operationally, I'm really excited about what this, , base
camp model really offers us.
. And it is exciting because I'm, , there might be a service now partner out
there that has done this already.
, if so, I'm, I'm not aware of it.
So I think , we're definitely charting some new waters with that model.
CJ: that's, that's crazy, man, that's, I love it.
I love
Duke: well with it.
I mean, earlier, you said you, you push it down market a bit, ? So
that, , smaller organizations can get in on the big functional dreams.
Right?
But if you hear the fact that it's not only for smaller orgs,
but orgs that wouldn't even.
Naturally be part of the service ecosystem.
And now it's like, bam, it's a service that you can consume.
Just, that's really impressive.
CJ: And it just highlights the functionality and
the value of service now.
Right?
Like
Duke: Right?,
CJ: because for me, you build an app on service now and now you
can, find customers who also happen to have the service now platform.
Right.
But.
, now, if you can actually build on service now, utilize everything
that the platform has, right?
That you don't have to throw, you know, a ton of, , dollars into
building everything from scratch.
And then you can actually, acquire customers that exist
outside of the service that he goes, that's a game changer.
Like kudos to you guys.
This is amazing.
I love this.
Peter: really nice to hear.
We haven't really talked about it too much outside of the work.
So to hear that level of excitement, it was just really affirming.
So I definitely appreciate that.
We're in the middle of making sure that we have it right.
And we can deploy it to our customers.
At scale.
but so far with the handful of people who are using it, it's
been working , really well.
I gotta give props to the team.
They've done a great job of implementing it.
, and I'm, I'm very excited to see where this is in a couple of years.
Once, once we scaled it up , and have a lot more customers on it, I think it.
It does unlock the ServiceNow story for a lot more organizations.
CJ: Right.
Absolutely.
Silence.
Duke: if somebody was interested in investigating what you could offer
them, or just wants to a deeper dive.
how would they do that?
Peter: I mean, obviously you can start with our website, which is www.
SerenityEHS.
com.
, but you can reach out to us directly.
, we also have, the co founder Chris leads up.
, our sales team.
So Chris Markham, , you know, you can look us up on LinkedIn
or, or, email us directly.
I think our emails are all our first name dot last name at training.
EHS.
com.
Be happy to talk to people more about, if you need an EHS solution, we're happy
to talk to you about it and take you through that path and talk about how.
EHS can touch a lot of areas.
So, , the story could be different depending on the industry, , depending
on what your specific needs are.
So happy to get into that and talk about how the platform can link to
the outcomes you're trying to get to.
Duke: We'll have links in the description below to all of those resources that
peter described . So would the team.
in the corporate political architecture be called the team, or would it be some
subdiscipline of facilities or secure?
Like,
Peter: Yeah, I think
Duke: did that fall in the org?
Peter: That's a fairly variable, especially depending on , industry
and size of organization.
, it's like Nate mentioned earlier, it can be under HR, it can be under
facilities, so we could just refer to it as Whichever team manages
your health and safety, right?
to be honest, like some of our solutions color outside the lines.
so you might have an EHS team and a facilities team.
And so like they have to work together.
That's something that's actually come up a lot is EHS will assign
things out to someone else.
Right.
So,
Nathan: And most, most companies that have a health and safety team, the employees
know there is a health and safety team.
They, maybe don't know where it falls in , the executive org chart.
But I think saying, contact your health and safety team.
The organizations that have it, they know who that is.
Duke: Right.
We are at time.
Peter and Nathan.
I want to thank you both so much for coming and telling us about the exciting
possibilities of EHS on service.
Now, if you are a service now, product owner or architect or admin at a customer,
and you want to set up a dragon to slay.
And get all that glory, be sure to get in touch with your EHS teams
internally, find out who manages your health and safety and, , just let them
know you can send them to this podcast.
You can send them to SobrenityEHS.
com and, , just keep on delivering value with the ServiceNow platform.
Peter: Hey, thank you so much for having us.
Yeah, this was fantastic.
Nathan: This was fun.