Savencia: Facilitate transversal knowledge sharing for 40 brand divisions, and more than 20.000 employees, across 120 countries
Savencia Saveurs & Spécialités is a global FMCG leader, an independent family group focused on high value-added cheese and gourmet specialties. added value. It is the 2nd largest cheese group in France and the 5th largest in the world.
Present in 120 countries, its international development is based on quality, innovation and the ambition of excellence.
Its complex portfolio comprises nearly 40 different brands, all of which require excellent management of knowledge to thrive in their respective competitive markets.
Industry
FMCG
Solution
Knowledge Management
Employees
21.297
Country
France (HQ) with presence in 120 countries
The challenge
In line with the philosophy, “one tool, one usage”, Savencia was looking for a solution to support knowledge sharing across its complex organisation.
With a great diversity of brands, departments and country branches, the company needed a single-source-of-truth for all validated and trusted knowledge. A knowledge platform that would provide users with instant access to crucial company knowledge on a diversity of topics (policies, market practices, key documents).
Therefore, the challenge was to implement a centralised solution capable of facilitating the search and access of information to the group’s perennial knowledge.
In addition to this, Savencia was looking for a partner capable of supporting the migration of the old Lotus Notes documents in the new platform. The Lotus Notes technology was being decommissioned so important company knowledge was at risk of being lost.
The Solution
After several years of working with Elium for the management of all market watch knowledge, Savencia decided to also deploy Elium for global knowledge management.
Being a reliable, secure and advanced knowledge management solution, Elium was seen as the perfect fit for the company’s complex needs. With advanced data transfer capabilities, the team at Elium was able to support the full migration of the existing Lotus Notes, in a timely and cost-effective manner.
Under the philosophy “one tool, one usage”, Elium was chosen to be part of a larger digital workplace ecosystem, where every technology served a clear purpose (e.g. Microsoft Sharepoint for documents in progress, Elium for validated and trusted knowledge, Facebook Workplace for internal communication).
Why Elium?
Rich knowledge sharing
Similar to the previous experience with Lotus Notus, Elium allows Savencia users to create rich, blending text, images, videos and many other formats.
Pre-defined Templates
Created by administrators, can be used to simplify knowledge sharing. The fields are pre-defined so content creators can create new knowledge fast and easy.
Multi-language capabilities
With such a global footprint, and teams working in several languages, Savencia chose Elium for the ability to display the user interface and the content in several languages. Today, as Elium evolved, Savencia is also utilising the automatic translation of content, a new feature launched in 2022.
Knowledge Validity Date
Since Elium was chosen as the single source of truth for trusted and validated knowledge, the ability to attach validity dates to content was highly appreciated. Content creators can mark a content as up to date or expired. They will be notified in their dashboard when it is the time to update it.
Full-text search, Google-like
Savencia’s team was convinced by Elium’s search capabilities, which allow users to find the information they need in a matter of seconds. The filters and tags allow users to refine their search results and find the right information, at the right time.
Automated Activity digests
The possibility to automate activity digests that are sent in specific days, is of great importance to Savencia. Like these, they can ensure that every Monday morning, users get the latest updates of new knowledge that was published on the platform.
Intelligent Alerts
The platform also allows for users to set-up their own alerts, based on knowledge of interest. Like this, each user can be automatically notified when a new knowledge of interest has been published.
Friendly Mobile App
The ability to access knowledge on the go, using the mobile app, is very appreciated for Savencia’s team. Their commercial teams for instance are always on the move, so being able to stay informed at all times is key.
Fixed tree structure and logical knowledge organisation
Through its way of organising content (in Tabs, Spaces and Groups of Spaces), Elium proposes a fixed tree structure which is very logical for both administrators and users. This helps users find the information they need very fast, and administrators to keep the platform organised and clutter free.
Integration with Facebook Workplace
Under the philosophy “one tool, one usage”, Savencia is using Facebook Workplace for internal communication. The fact that Elium is able to integrate with this tool was an important reason for satisfaction.
Safe Azure Active Directory compatibility
This ensures the safety of all connections to the platform, and simplifies the process for administrators and users.
Friendly and intuitive interface
The fact that Elium has a friendly user interface and a modern look ensured that users are engaged to use it and facilitated product adoption.
The results
When it comes to benefits identified, Savencia’s team noticed that with the implementation of Elium, several business indicators have improved.
Reduced time to search for information
With a powerful search engine, Elium has allowed teams at Savencia to find the information they need in a matter of seconds. Regardless of the content they are looking for, with the help of filters, they can drill down search results and find the answer to their questions.
Increased productivity
As teams now get instant access to the most important information that they need to get their job done, their productivity has also increased. They are able to perform better and faster in projects and daily activities.
Removed silos effect between teams
With such a large global footprint, there is a risk of silos being created between different teams or divisions. Luckily, having Elium in place, as a central place for sharing key knowledge, helped remove silos and increase internal transparency and collaboration.
Improved business performance
Having instant access to key knowledge about the market, competitors, policies and many other important business topics, helped the team to focus less on searching for knowledge, and more on creating real change and positive business results.
How did we make it a success?
The implementation process of Elium for Knowledge Management inside Savencia, included several different steps.
Kick off the project
The collaboration started with a smaller project for 100 people, dedicated to Market Watch Knowledge Sharing.
Extending the project to more users
The project was then extended to enrol 1000 people from the company.
Moving the focus to Knowledge Management
Consequently, a new instance was created and dedicated purely for Knowledge Management. This represented the actual kick-off of the project.
Enrolling 10.000 new users
A new step of the KM project was marked by enrolling 10.000 users.
Migrating a large number of Lotus Notes Databases
Over 80 Lotus Notes bases have been migrated inside Elium to ensure that the knowledge base offers users access to the most relevant information and that crucial company knowledge is not lost in the migration process.
Creating a dedicated Steering Committee
In 2021, a dedicated Steering Committee was created, so as to have a better oversight of the 160 spaces of the platform.
Their platform
The Savencia – Elium Knowledge platform is dense in content – this is why a good structuring is necessary. The platform has nearly 160 spaces, 200 space administrators and 3 system administrators.
Spaces open to everyone in the company
Covering RH topics, job offers and genera policies.
Spaces by job category / job function
For specific departments such as IT, Finance etc.
Spaces dedicated to specific company branches
To support knowledge share inside those local divisions.
Elium is a knowledge management tool adapted to large companies that is always evolving.
We started the project with a single use-case focused on Market Watch and after time, gaining trust in the tool and being satisfied, we decided to extend it to fit our global knowledge management needs.
We have deployed Elium gradually to our entire company (15.000+) to fit our Knowledge Management initiative, all across the world (120+ countries). We found it a great option when needing to migrate from Lotus Notes, and after more than 10 years of using it, we are appreciating how it constantly evolved to meet our demands and the new market exigencies.
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