FONA Wins a CIO 100 Award for Use of Enterprise Social Networking Software from Socialtext

FONA transforms business processes and eliminates some 50,000 e-mails a year with employee social networking and collaborative intranet.

June 1, 2010, Geneva, Illinois

FONA International, a company that designs and manufacturers flavors for the world's largest food companies, has won a CIO 100 Award for its innovative use of enterprise social networking software to improve employee productivity and transform business processes internally. Judged by CIO magazine, the annual award is given to 100 elite companies that “demonstrate excellence and achievement in IT.”

Utilizing Socialtext's enterprise social software platform, FONA created a social intranet where employees can easily manage projects, events, and important manufacturing processes with little to no help from IT. With enterprise social networking profiles, FONA employees can share expertise with colleagues and connect around key topics of interest to drive new business opportunities.

"FONApedia, our social intranet, has empowered our employees to work together in improving our processes internally, helping us serve our customers even better than before," says FONA's Steve Brewer, the IT leader who spearheaded the project. "Because of Socialtext's flexible software as a service (SaaS) offering, we've had no hardware to manage. We are able to take advantage of Socialtext's fast development cycles and seamless updates."

Here's an example of how FONA's collaborative intranet changed the company's business processes:

• Many FONA employees 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 more than 4,000 e-mails a month being sent, or 50,000 a year, inflicting a burden on both the organizers and the testers.
• Now, all the scheduling is tracked via a shared workspace in Socialtext. 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.

"At Socialtext, we measure our success by how our customers differentiate and improve their business through the use of enterprise social software," says Eugene Lee, Socialtext's CEO. "The business results FONA has achieved with Socialtext highlights what's possible when an organization provides their people with fast, flexible tools to free the flow of work inside their company."

About FONA International, Inc.

Founded in 1987, FONA International creates and manufactures flavors for many of the largest food, beverage and nutraceutical companies in the world. It offers flavor solutions for the confection, sweet, culinary and beverage market segments from its state-of-the-art, 33-acre campus in Geneva, IL. FONA International has established a reputation as the forward-thinking, independent solution provider in the very competitive flavor industry.

About Socialtext

Socialtext addresses the critical issues organizations face as their people and teams struggle for better ways to share knowledge, ideas and expertise. With Socialtext's enterprise social software platform, people and teams are synchronized, highly engaged and able to move fast. The Socialtext collaboration platform employs a broad set of social software technologies including microblogging, social networking, filtered activity streams, widget-based dashboards, blogs and wikis. Socialtext offers both the convenience of SaaS and the security of an on-site appliance, for the fastest time to value. More than 6,500 businesses world-wide have accelerated their business performance with Socialtext, including Oxford University Press, Meredith Corporation, OSIsoft, Symantec, The Washington Post, and Epitaph Records. Learn more about Socialtext at www.socialtext.com.

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As the Enterprise 2.0 leader, Socialtext applies Web 2.0 technologies such as enterprise microblogging, enterprise social networking and wikis to the critical challenges facing businesses. Socialtext's enterprise collaboration platform allows employees to share expertise, speed workflows and get their jobs done faster. Read our latest news highlights, press releases, coverage & awards, and recent and upcoming events.