About Schoeller Allibert
Schoeller Allibert is an international company with a wide array of reusable packaging solutions, both standard and custom-made. It offers an extensive product range for distribution, storage and retail display. Well-known customers include AB Inbev, BMW, GlaxoSmithKline, Unilever and iGPS. The company employs 2,000 people in 13 countries, mainly in Europe, but also in Australia, the United States and Hong Kong.
Challenge: improve collaboration, communication and knowledge-sharing
Schoeller Allibert arose through a number of mergers and acquisitions. This resulted in a very diverse IT landscape, in which communication and collaboration were still often taking place via email and file-sharing. On-premises versions of Exchange and SharePoint were used. Employees had their own network drive and departments used a shared drive. Many files were shared by email attachment, so that mailboxes quickly filled up and documents were hard to find.
Schoeller Allibert wanted to modernize, and its preference was for cloud solutions. The goal was to have employees work more productively and efficiently by supporting them with a platform for communication, knowledge-sharing and collaboration. This would in turn form the basis for increasing engagement with customers and hence customer satisfaction. In other words, employee empowerment to increase customer satisfaction.
Schoeller Allibert put it this way: “Help us implement a secure global collaboration and communication platform that allows personalized content and is relevant to our daily work now and in the future.”
Before Macaw came along, Schoeller Allibert arranged for a number of its employees to gain experience with both Google G Suite and Microsoft 365 during a one-month pilot, so that a choice could be made. Because of its ease of use and integration options, the decision was made to migrate to Microsoft 365.
However, simply having a platform is not enough, so Schoeller Allibert set up a partner selection process to ensure optimal use of the platform. In its proposal, Macaw emphasized adoption and management. The goal was to bring about behavioral change so that employees would start working in a different way. Most of the benefits of Microsoft 365 can only be achieved when the platform is part of the daily routine and brings about a real change in the way employees communicate, collaborate and share information with each other. Adoption of Microsoft 365 is therefore extremely important.
Approach: respond flexibly to changing circumstances
Macaw got started in October 2019. The first of the three phases was the validate & prepare phase. This took around seven weeks and consisted mainly of identifying and validating through interviews with relevant stakeholders what everybody wanted. Everything the company wanted to achieve was recorded, so that Schoeller Allibert would not be faced with any unpleasant surprises during implementation. A governance plan, a communication/adoption plan and an implementation plan resulted from this phase, and also formed the basis for further activity.
This was followed by two phases, partially run simultaneously. Personal productivity was all about increasing individual output through the adoption of Office, Exchange and OneDrive for Business. Smart collaboration was about using Teams as an easy, fast and efficient way to work together. The personal productivity phase was started, but the collaboration aspect became even more relevant due to the coronavirus crisis. As a result, phase three was brought forward and the two phases were rolled out simultaneously.
Through digital Microsoft Teams training sessions, Macaw got everyone within Schoeller Allibert up to speed with smart collaboration. An important pillar of the adoption was the appointment of champions: employees to soak up knowledge and spread it further within the organization. User and administrator training sessions were given for the use of OneDrive and Teams. An adoption portal was also created based on SharePoint Online, where webinars, presentations and training materials can be found. In a Yammer community, employees can ask questions and find people who can share their knowledge.
In November 2020, 1,100 employees were active on the platform, much to Schoeller Allibert’s satisfaction. At Macaw, an average of five employees were involved in the project, focusing on the core elements of implementation: adoption, management and security. Both phases have now been completed and the fourth phase is in the pipeline, which focuses entirely on smart communication.
Result of adopting Microsoft 365: increased productivity of employees
One concrete result is that many more employees have started using Microsoft 365. Every day, 1,000 employees use the Microsoft 365 platform and more than 800 people use Microsoft Teams. More than 300 meetings and 800 one-on-one calls take place via Teams on a daily basis, and employees are able to find each other more easily. In a short time, many new teams have been created, in which active collaboration is taking place. The number of emails with attachments has also been greatly reduced and documents are increasingly stored in the cloud. What’s more, employees now have an optimally equipped and well-secured digital workplace. The same platform is used everywhere, which not only makes employees more productive, but also reduces shadow IT.
What did the client think?
Ronald Scheffers, in charge of the Microsoft 365 implementation at Schoeller Allibert: “From the start of our collaboration, Macaw took the long view with us by broaching issues such as adoption and governance. I have found Macaw to be a partner that is able both to listen carefully to the wishes of an organization and be critical where necessary. In our collaboration, they clearly look for a good personal fit and show a desire to build on that together. That worked well for us; we too put people first.”
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