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Delicious Productivity Improvements For This Flavor Partner

FONA International designs and manufactures flavors for many of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. They know getting the taste just right for a product involves combining the perfect mixture of several key ingredients. Similarly, they know that providing their staff with the right collaboration tools can make a huge difference in how effectively they operate both internally and with their customers. Until now, FONA’s people were relying on older tools such as e-mail and documents to share information and organize projects. Then they discovered that there is a better way to work.

Summary
Problems	No trusted central location where people could find, share, and contribute to information Project scheduling and information tracking via e-mail was too cumbersome and time consuming Departments were not as well connected across the organization as they could be Communicating with customers and vendors was largely a manual process
Socialtext Solution	A new collaborative intranet that aggregates recent news, event calendars, and blog entries Detailed employee profiles and groups for sharing common interests Shared workspaces for managing projects, events, certification tracking, and product documentation Self-service customer extranet, where customers can access the product information they need
Benefits	Improved employee productivity by eliminating almost 50,000 e-mails a year from one specific process, freeing up staff time for high-value work Heightened sense of community, where employees know more about the company, and more about each other, resulting in better access to the people and information everyone needs to do their jobs Increased customer satisfaction by providing a self-service extranet, where customers can access the information they need, tailored to their account Low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): SaaS-based solution. No internal staff or outside consultants needed to install and maintain the platform, and no developers required to build applications

“We didn’t want to be dependent on consultants to customize and add functionality, and we didn’t have the internal infrastructure, expertise, or budget to deploy, extend and maintain SharePoint. Socialtext’s hosted solution was just what we needed.”

Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration

Why Socialtext?

In 2008 internal demand for collaborative technologies was growing inside FONA. Their executives recognized the need to communicate more effectively both inside the company, as well as with suppliers, partners, and customers. They also needed to keep people and projects better synchronized, and provide an easy to use platform for sharing information with everyone in the company.

In search of a solution, the IT department researched several different platforms, including 37 Signal’s Basecamp, Microsoft SharePoint, and Socialtext. After evaluating each platform on functionality, cost, and ease of use, Brewer concluded that Socialtext was the clear winner.

Providing Everyone With Access To Content, Colleagues, and Conversations

One of the first solutions FONA implemented with Socialtext was a new collaborative company intranet, named FONApedia. While FONApedia is much more than just an internal wiki, the name makes it easy for employees to associate the new intranet as “the place to go to get information.” Some of the information FONApedia includes:

“We wanted to give our employees secure tools at work, which provide benefits similar to the popular web applications they use in their personal lives. For example: Enable them to see everything that matters at a glance with an iGoogle-like home page; Share openly with their colleagues similar to Twitter, and have information at their fingertips like on Wikipedia.”

Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration

Announcements Blog: Corporate Communications realized that sending e-mails to the entire company distribution list did not provide the type of open, two-way communication they wanted for FONA. By sharing company news via a blog, employees are able to post responses, and start a dialog not only with their executives but also among themselves. Sharing information via blogs also means that future employees can benefit from the information, since it is not locked away in the inboxes of just the original recipients.
Competition Central: To help keep everyone aware of, and ideally ahead of the competition, FONApedia aggregates competition-related blog posts, and provides wiki pages devoted to competitive intelligence on each major competitor. This helps FONA be proactive, instead of reactive against competitive moves.
Master Calendar: All upcoming company events, industry events, holidays, etc. are now shared on a company calendar for everyone to see.
Centers of Excellence: Here several teams such as Marketing, The Green Team, and Flavor Development can openly share best practices, ensuring that the collective insights of the entire company are accessible to everyone.
Process Central: Provides links to documentation that outlines each process and Standard Operating Procedure. When someone asks a question about how to do something, they are pointed here for the answer, removing the burden of answering the same questions repeatedly via e-mail, and ensuring everyone is aligned and has the info they need when they need it.
Blog Central: Works similar to a newspaper, displaying columns of recent blog post titles in a single place for people to read.
Resource Central: Provides links to information about corporate identity, branding, mission statements, and vision; as well as the internal company dictionary, FAQs, and the employee manual.
Idea Central: A place where everyone is welcome to share their ideas on how to improve the company, suggest potential projects, recommend ways to cut costs, or anything else they’d like to share.

FONA knows that their new intranet is not just about content; it is also about their people. So FONApedia has quickly become the place employees go to learn more about their colleagues, and connect around common interests. Using Socialtext People, each employee has a dedicated profile page where they can share information about themselves, including their education, employment history, skills, hobbies, and photos. Knowing more about their peers has resulted in the formation of company-wide groups where employees with similar interests can discuss topics, ask questions, and learn more about their fellow FONA colleagues.

Finally, Brewer has started to use SocialCalc, a social spreadsheet for distributed teams, to track several of the company’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). The results are displayed on the new company intranet, providing a single source of current information. Now when values are updated, data is dynamically shared across multiple worksheets into a unified KPI dashboard accessible across the company. This transparent style of sharing, where everyone is “In The Know” is helping further drive the culture of openness within FONA.

Increased Productivity By Going From 4,000 E-mails A Month Down To Only 1

In addition to their normal daily jobs, many FONA employees also help the company by participating in taste tests of new flavors. These tests are conducted up to 40 times a month, via flavor panels organized in their Sensory Laboratory. To manage all the logistics and scheduling of the tests, lab organizers would send an e-mail to about 50 people, who each sent back a response requesting the time slot they wanted. The organizers would then go back and forth with each participant either approving the time, or suggesting a new one. The result was over 4,000 e-mails a month being sent, inflicting a burden on both the organizers and the testers.

Using Socialtext, FONA implemented a better way to manage this process. Now, all the scheduling is tracked via a shared workspace. Each month’s schedule is now posted on a wiki page where employees can see which time slots are available. This new process enables the organizers to send just a single e-mail at the start of each month, which directs everyone to that month’s sign-up page. Not only does the page give everyone access to the shared schedule, but it also contains links which testers may click to add the appointments they have signed up for to their own personal calendar. With far less time required to organize the tests, FONA employees can now focus on flavors, not e-mail.

Ease of Use Helps Socialtext Adoption Grow Organically

The incredible success of moving the taste test scheduling to Socialtext had an additional benefit. By providing people with an example of how they could improve an existing process so easily by moving it to Socialtext, new use cases started popping up. Now, several teams are using project pages inside Socialtext to track the status of project budgets, schedules, and team members. These pages contain links to project content, profiles of the participants, and pages for assigned tasks and status. Keeping things organized in Socialtext is helping FONA stay focused and ensuring they meet their project schedules.

“We were using multiple Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to track hundreds of training events and standard operating procedures, but they did not provide the automated verification trail that we needed for all our third party audit validations. With Socialtext, now we don’t have to struggle with keeping all those spreadsheets and documents synchronized with one another.”

Ramesh Shah, VP of Technical Services

Removing the Burdens of Spreadsheet Versions

To help keep skills current, FONA’s Technical Services team tracks the training and certification of each of their employees. This is not just a “nice to have,” it is also a requirement for regulatory compliance in areas such as Environmental Safety and Health. Previously their process involved updating Excel spreadsheets, which they would share by forwarding around multiple files via e-mail. Unfortunately, keeping track of information this way has several pitfalls. For example, when several people are making updates, how do you make sure they are each starting from the most current version? How do you know if the manual merging of changes from multiple files was done accurately? For auditing purposes, how do keep track of who made the changes, and when? Finally, how do you communicate the changes with everyone when a change has been made?

To solve these issues, FONA is moving the process from Excel to online via a Socialtext workspace. Now the information is stored on shared pages, accessible to everyone on the team. This ensures everyone is accessing the most current information, and when changes are required, people simply edit the page. Since all updates in Socialtext are tracked, the date/time and author of the changes are automatically recorded, providing FONA with the audit trail they require. When updates are made, the changes are broadcast to the activity stream on Socialtext Dashboard, so everyone can discover that a change has occurred. Additionally, people can add the page to their watch list, which will cause an e-mail to be sent to them when the page is updated.

Increased Customer Satisfaction With Self-Serve Extranet

FONA customers can choose from a catalog of thousands of unique flavors. Today, when details are required about one of those flavors, information is typically shared back and forth via e-mail and spreadsheets. FONA is now experimenting with a new web-based, self-service platform running on Socialtext. The site, currently available to a few trial customers, will provide them with a library of their preferred flavors, enabling quick access to product information such as regulatory documents, lists of allergens, kosher status, organic and nutritional information, and more. This new process reduces complexity, saves times, increases customer satisfaction, and strengthens the partnership with customers. This new customer site will also be used to share information related to the services FONA provides, and in the near future will contain blog posts on recent flavor trends in the customer’s industry. The flavor development process is highly collaborative, and Socialtext offers a very flexible platform for FONA and their customers to work together.

“Once people saw what they could do with Socialtext, each business unit started their own social software revolution.”

Steve Brewer, Customer Connection Mgr. & Systems Integration

The Use Cases For Socialtext Are Almost Limitless

As you’ve read, FONA is not using Socialtext for just a single purpose. Instead, the company is benefiting from the platform in many ways, all across the company. There are several reasons why Socialtext is catching on so wildly at FONA:

For the users, it comes down to how simple it is to create and share content. Using the built-in editors is easy, so little or no training is required.
For the department managers, Socialtext is able to quickly solve each of their unique business requirements. The one platform provided great flexibility with very little customization, and no special consultants or developers are required to build each solution, so the costs are low, and time-to-deployment is short.
System Administrators are thrilled with Socialtext’s Software-As-A-Service delivery model, as there is no need to download, install, configure, nor maintain the platform. Instead all the hardware and software is managed for them, allowing the team to focus on other projects.

A Better Way To Work

Like many companies, FONA realized they needed to move beyond e-mail and office suites as their primary collaboration tools. They wanted to find a way to better connect their employees across the entire company, to facilitate better knowledge sharing, and to foster tighter relationships both internally and with their customers. Using Socialtext, FONA now has an integrated social software platform that meets all of their “Enterprise 2.0” requirements. They have discovered a better way to work. The new platform gives everyone access to shared information, ensuring everyone can easily discover the things they need to know. It is now easier to organize and manage meetings and projects, so people have time to focus on getting things done. Employees can form closer bonds with their co-workers all across the company, and learn more about the skills they each provide. With their new tools in place, FONA International is ready to continue developing outstanding flavors, and creating great solutions for their customers around the globe.