Case study A case study from The Economist Intelligence Unit Schneider Electric A touch of SPICE: working smarter through cloud-based employee collaboration Schneider Electric is a global corporation specialising in electricity distribution and automation and in the manufacture of components for energy management It reports annual revenues of about $35bn and is headquartered in Rueil-Malmaison, France In 2012, Schneider turned to cloud collaboration as part of a broad strategic effort to integrate the many businesses it had acquired during a period of sustained expansion If only Schneider knew what Schneider knows An increasingly cost-competitive environment requires that Schneider compete on its intellectual capital and the accumulated experience of its employees It utilizes a repository of intellectual capital and employees with deep knowledge of their domains—a competitive advantage Schneider cannot afford to lose Being cloud-based, the technologies were straightforward to implement … the real work came in design, where efforts focussed on shaping the user experience But Schneider knew it was not living up to its intellectual potential The reason: The company has 150,000 employees representing more than 80 nationalities scattered across 100 countries A 25-year period of expansion, resulting in 40 acquisitions, had left many workers siloed by country, culture, division and office Employees tended to rely on the blunt instrument of email for collaboration The firm knew it needed a more sophisticated way to make its vast trove of information and expertise available to all That challenge was embodied in the slogan: “If only Schneider knew what Schneider knows.” Connecting across boundaries Senior leadership set out actionable goals for driving cross-organisation knowledge sharing in Schneider’s 2012-2014 strategic plan They realised from the start that accomplishing these goals would be a tricky endeavour for a 200-year-old organisation where many were set in their ways They called this strategy “Connect”, setting measurable targets from the top and getting solutions fashioned from the ground up The company’s IT team decided to use cloud-based solutions, together with new technologies like social, mobile and big data to link employees around the world But the firm’s leaders understood that changing the way people work was not just about technology Deepak Bhandary, director of collaboration, stresses that “a change-management plan was a big part of the programme” A touch of SPICE To meet that challenge, IT staff worldwide pulled together to build a multifaceted platform called SPICE (Schneider Electric Platform for Information, Collaboration and Efficiency), which works in parallel with other communication tools This group established clear, measurable goals from the outset Their approach: extending the enterprise-wide metric of “digitisation level” into more specific measures of the actual collaboration needed to deliver business results © The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2015 Case study “Participation was by far the biggest measure, but we also looked at the type of participation”, says Mr Bhandary, who explains that the system design recognises the unique needs of different types of users who range from collaborators and contributors to visitors In addition, he says, “We defined a set of use cases For example ‘finding expertise’ was one criterion we used from the beginning When somebody tried to look for an expert, how did they it before and how would they it using SPICE?” Striking up business conversations The solution incorporates three principal components, all hosted on commercial cloud services: an intranet, an enterprise social network and a document-sharing system Being cloud-based, the technologies were straightforward to implement The real work came in design, where efforts focused on shaping the user experience The team particularly concentrated on their social network, with the goal of focusing employee conversations on solving challenges in every aspect of the company’s business “We’ve seen a significant reduction in the time it takes to deploy solutions and a 15 to 20 percent cost advantage over non-cloud-enabled platforms.” Arindan Sem, senior vice president of employee experience, Schneider Electric Marc Gelinas, senior manager of enterprise social and document management, likens information sharing to a lake “In their private lives, when people use social, they start consuming information from around the outside of the lake, and none of the information is critical,” he says, “but in the business world, you have to start from the centre—your immediate team—and the rings span out from the centre of the lake with information that’s critical to your group or line of business.” Since social is expected to replace email, “there’s an expectation that if someone includes information for you in a post, you’re going to something with it” Go big or go home The IT team recognised how tough it would be to get people in a geographically and culturally diverse organisation to adopt the new system To address this, they created a network of more than 200 local collaboration leaders across businesses and countries, supported by champions in each major component of the business Charged with raising awareness of the cloud-based tools, these leaders would offer training and support and celebrate success stories The time for a roll-out approached After initial pilot testing, the team decided on a “big bang” global launch based on the principle that to achieve critical mass, the platform would need to demonstrate enterprise-wide reach Initial uptake was faster among some demographic groups—notably millennials and people in Asia-Pacific, in part because of the younger population Schneider officials built on these initial wins by fostering “friendly competition” among countries and business units, highlighting the successes of early adopters to encourage further adoption Keeping information fresh Success was apparent in the first year, when SPICE attracted 45,000 unique users, with 30,000 coming back every week “SPICE allows people to connect not just with information and knowledge, but also with the experts behind that information,” says Mr Bhandary “This means that the information is always fresh because people are talking about it.” Cloud collaboration continues to be invaluable by virtually every metric Enterprise digitisation targets have been exceeded, and qualitative assessments have demonstrated real change in use cases such as finding expertise and building communities “We’ve seen a significant reduction in the time it takes to deploy solutions,” says Arindan Sem, senior vice president of employee experience, “and a 15-20% cost advantage over non-cloud-enabled platforms.” After two years, SPICE boasts 100,000 users, of whom more than 70,000 are active collaborators The ultimate outcome has been a greatly improved sharing of knowledge and expertise throughout the global organisation © The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2015 .. .Case study “Participation was by far the biggest measure, but we also looked at the type of participation”, says Mr Bhandary, who explains that the system design recognises the unique needs of. .. experience, Schneider Electric Marc Gelinas, senior manager of enterprise social and document management, likens information sharing to a lake “In their private lives, when people use social, they start... the team decided on a “big bang” global launch based on the principle that to achieve critical mass, the platform would need to demonstrate enterprise-wide reach Initial uptake was faster among