Bühler Group centralizes access and distribution of content with Microsoft 365 and MondayCoffee

Summary

Bühler is a global market leader in the supply of flour production plants, pasta and chocolate production lines, animal feed manufacturing installations, and aluminum die casting systems. As a global organization with 13,000 employees operating in 140 countries, Bühler needed a single platform for information, communication, and collaboration among employees and external stakeholders.

MondayCoffee’s cloud software that intelligently combines Microsoft’s main technologies on a user-friendly and standardized platform, enabled the organization to access, share, and distribute all relevant information and knowledge anywhere and at any time. Global teams can work more efficiently and improve collaboration with customers, partners and suppliers.

Bühler was able to create a future-proof working environment for a digitally efficient organization.

Challenge

When the project started in 2015, Bühler had multiple platforms and tools (Lync, Outlook, Oracle, Jive, File Shares, SharePoint, Enterprise Social Network) to store and share content – to collaborate, communicate, and work within local and global teams as well as together with customers, partners, or suppliers. This was creating inefficiencies, impeding knowledge management, and affecting individual and organizational productivity. In fact, employees had no single entry point to access company information fast and on every device; share content with external parties in a secure, efficient, and user-friendly way; or use virtual rooms for effective collaboration within global teams.

Bühler had to replace the old intranet and wanted to consolidate the current content management, communication, and collaboration tool landscape on one single, out-of-the-box platform – based on Microsoft 365 – for an integrated working environment and user experience. Bühler was already a Microsoft 365 user but hadn’t yet seized the opportunity to make the most out of it and combine all the technologies and apps on one single platform – in a convenient, working-scenario-based way.

With the new solution, the client wanted to use the full potential of Microsoft 365 technologies and create a single source of truth for its entire organization. For Bühler it was essential that their teams outside Europe also had easy and fast access to information and that global teams working on global projects had the necessary infrastructure to collaborate together.

Strategy

Bühler Group chose an out-of-the-box solution, based on Microsoft 365, that combined communication, document management, and collaboration on one single platform. The new digital working environment had to function as a single entry point for the whole organization to access company information, including other tools and systems, and on which to work effectively as a global team. The performance of the solution in terms of speed, security, and efficiency in maintaining and operating the platform was key.

Bühler chose MondayCoffee’s cloud solution as it uses the full potential of Microsoft Office 365 technologies and offers a best-practice, user-friendly platform to combine information management, content management, communication, and collaboration.

The team implemented the project in two phases. In phase one, Bühler established a global information platform with a unified start site to consume targeted company information, to engage with the CEO in a company-wide blog, and to access knowledge sites containing company norms documents, product data, and more. The team built interfaces with other data systems (e.g., SAP ERP, Hybris PCM) to guarantee automated data transfer and tagging between existing systems and the new global information platform and, thus, to give users quick access to information for the organization. Today, for example, with only a few clicks, employees can call up the right norms with the help of a full text search with extensive refiners from more than 25,000 norms.

In phase two, Bühler is extending the use of the platform towards collaboration. Using standardized, best-practice layouts and functionalities, teams will be able to create collaboration sites with only one click and start collaborating in predefined virtual work spaces. The team is assessing interfaces with other technologies (e.g., SAP) to further improve efficiency and individual and organizational productivity.

The IT and Process Department itself is already using project sites. In a project site, they can add members, store all the project information, interact with each other (via chatting, blogging, or Skype for Business calling), share a common notebook, and add a task manager or calendar. To each project site, the ITP department also added status information, which is consolidated in real-time in a central project office dashboard in order to always have an overview of all projects. Having virtual and predefined workspace templates available for projects, workgroups, departments, regions and locations, and products and services make the MondayCoffee solution not only the single source of truth, but also an ideal place to collaborate within the organization.

The implementation of MondayCoffee’s digital working environment was mainly done using the live system. Since MondayCoffee’s solution is out-of-the-box, after a short analysis and conceptual phase, the new ‘yet empty’ system was live and could be filled with content together with the project team. This method allows users to get familiar with the system right from the start and detect issues before going live. A core team of MondayCoffee and Bühler representatives has been working closely on the project from the start, meeting on a weekly basis to push the project forward and assist pilot users and site owners. The members of the core team continue to be a reference point for the organization in the further roll-out of collaboration sites including Microsoft Teams.

Results

Infrastructure:

• Change from multiple platforms to Microsoft 365 that covers communication, document management, and collaboration
• Change from an on-premise infrastructure to Microsoft’s powerful cloud enabling faster distribution of data worldwide

User:

• One single platform for all employees worldwide to collaborate and to easily access company data at any time, everywhere and on any device

Company:

• Increase in efficiency and productivity due to a unique platform; a powerful search function (tagging); smart interfaces; a standard and uniform presentation of information and predefined virtual collaboration rooms

Consolidating information storage and presentation for content from multiple retired systems (some on-premise) on a single platform leads to better accessibility and lower maintenance efforts as well as to a reduction of potential data redundancies.

Advanced search portals guarantee effortless and immediate access to necessary information, which leads to an increase in efficiency and higher quality results.

Search functionality for and direct access to content from dedicated systems as d.3, hybris and Simplex facilitate and simplify many work processes.

Structured and uniform presentation of all location-specific information simplifies travel planning and interaction with responsible colleagues.

Read full case study