embecta stands up enterprise service from day one

embecta makes products that people living with diabetes depend on every day. So when the company spun off from its parent organization in 2022 to become independent, there was no room for a slow IT buildout. The newly formed team had to stand up an entire technology ecosystem with a fraction of the workforce while continuing to support a global operation in diabetes care.

The team selected Freshservice for its rapid deployment and ease of configuration, standing up a multichannel service portal without a team of developers. What began as IT service management now processes thousands of tickets daily across multiple business functions, with shared services and finance all operating through a single portal. The team is now also extending into asset and infrastructure management with Freshworks’ on-premise ITAM, Device42, building the visibility needed to respond to critical incidents without scrambling.

"We always wanted there to be a one-stop shop," says Madeline Coluccio, associate director of IT process and program management. "It shouldn’t really be their responsibility to figure out where to go for different areas."

The company

A global medical technology company, embecta is advancing its 100-year legacy in insulin delivery to become a broad-based medical supplies company. It was established in 2022 as an independent, publicly traded company following a spin-off from Becton, Dickinson and Company.

The challenge

As a newly independent company, embecta was building its technology stack from the ground up—rolling out laptops, servers, and enterprise applications simultaneously—with a significantly leaner IT team than it had under its former parent. The ITSM platform at the previous organization required dedicated development resources for even minor changes, making it a poor fit for a small team that needed to move fast.

The challenge went beyond IT. Shared services functions covering finance and HR tasks also needed structured intake and workflow management, and the team knew from experience that siloed tools and email-based support created confusion rather than clarity. Employees were left to determine on their own whether a problem belonged to IT, HR, or another department, friction that slowed resolution and undermined the support experience.

When something did go wrong, the team had no centralized visibility into infrastructure dependencies and no way to quickly understand which applications, servers, and databases were connected or impacted. 

With a full technology rollout underway and a global workforce counting on fast, accessible help, embecta needed a platform it could deploy quickly, configure without developers, and extend across business functions from day one.

The solution

Freshservice stood out for what it didn't require: a large deployment team, coding expertise, or months of implementation. Its configuration-based design meant embecta could stand the platform up quickly and begin iterating, deploying new service catalog items in days rather than the extended timelines the previous platform demanded. "We didn't want to have a whole team of developers," says Coluccio. "Freshservice did all of those things and also was a great user experience."

From the start, the team made intentional decisions about the employee experience. They eliminated email and phone as support channels entirely, opting for a service portal with a robust catalog, Freshchat integrated on both the Freshservice homepage and the company intranet, and WhatsApp for employees on the go. Chat gives agents the space to research and respond thoughtfully rather than scrambling under the pressure of a live phone call—a better experience for everyone.

Freshservice, powered by AWS, provided the flexibility to extend the platform well beyond IT. Using Workspaces, the team onboarded shared services like finance and HR into the same portal, with workflow automations routing tickets and gathering approvals automatically. Business team members were even trained to administer their own workspaces, a level of self-sufficiency the previous platform's development-heavy model would not have supported.

To build a trusted CMDB and gain complete visibility into its hybrid infrastructure, embecta implemented Device42 for automated discovery and application dependency mapping. Device42 continuously maps the relationships between applications, servers, databases, and infrastructure, giving the team the operational context needed to quickly assess the impact of incidents and planned changes without relying on tribal knowledge. 

"It's so important that we understand what all is impacted," says Coluccio. "We don't want to be scrambling to try to call the one person who has the information."

The impact

Since launching Freshservice, embecta has expanded the platform from IT into shared services and additional business functions, with new departments regularly requesting their own workspaces. Service catalog items that once required extended development cycles now deploy in days.

"One of the biggest changes for us in implementing Freshservice versus the ITSM platform that we had before is the flexibility and the speed in which we're able to deploy things and make changes," says Coluccio.

As Device42 is rolled out across embecta's infrastructure, the IT team is building a trusted CMDB backed by automated discovery and dependency mapping. This gives teams greater confidence during incidents and planned changes by providing immediate visibility into how applications, servers, and databases are connected, reducing manual investigation and improving operational resilience.