Making a positive impact on global health

Danone's mission is to bring health through food to as many people as possible. The French multinational operates in 120 countries. Its health-focused portfolio of brands has the power to positively impact the health of millions by bringing the right food, with the right nutrition, to the right people. To do so successfully, Danone relies on its global workforce to pull in the same direction. Through ServiceNow technologies, the company provides employees worldwide a unified experience, knowledge and services to enable them to actively participate in its mission.

Aligning purpose and performance

Danone has embarked on a transformation programme to optimise how its global teams work together. In 2022, Danone CEO Antoine de Saint-Affrique unveiled the 'Renew Danone'-strategy with the aim of delivering pivotal changes in product quality, speed of innovation and global agility.

A key component will be to ensure greater alignment between purpose and performance, consistently putting the customer at the heart of everything Danone does. It also means dramatically changing the work experience for employees, simplifying complexity across the entire organisation by moving away from inefficient and localised systems to an environment that streamlines access to information and key processes.

Tasked with delivering this change is the Danone Business Services (DBS) function. DBS is responsible for establishing a standardised experience for all 96,000 employees, for everything from HR to procurement to finance.

"There's nothing more soul-crushing than wanting to do your best work but wasting time searching for answers to simple questions using a cumbersome process that nobody understands", says Gregory Chocoloff, Director of IT & Data, Global HR Digitalization and Employee Experience at Danone. "We're removing local siloes to deliver more seamless employee experiences and creating a global approach that is digital and automated with the ServiceNow platform".

Resetting the daily experience for employees

At the heart of the Danone transformation, and a clear, practical demonstration of the company’s intent, is MyDanone, the new starting point for employees’ daily digital experiences.

Built on the ServiceNow AI platform for business transformation, MyDanone is Danone’s new employee portal, consolidating 30 local HR, IT and procurement systems and integrated with SAP. A personalised user experience enables employees to action everything from expense requests to holiday approvals, travel policies to onboarding. The emphasis is on self-service, but requesting help when needed is simple.

“MyDanone creates globalised workflows but allows local customisation in five languages, for example, to inform employees about location-based updates or required training,” says Gregory. “It is now the default stop for all employees.”

MyDanone is part of Founda, a wider project to drive back-office standardisation and hyper-automation through AI and RPA within Danone Business Services. It is the latest illustration of the growing engagement between Danone and ServiceNow—a relationship that dates back to 2017.

“ServiceNow was the obvious choice for Founda,” Gregory notes. “It’s a recognised leader in this type of project. ServiceNow is a proven and scalable platform and allows the right level of customisation.”

Specifically, Founda makes use of ServiceNow App Engine and ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD).

The low-code capability enables Danone to build new apps or improve new features quickly, allowing the company to focus on requirement gathering and stakeholder management rather than the technical development. “It means our teams are much closer to the reality of the business and to the employee experience,” Gregory points out. “It’s taking less than two months to go from initial idea to production.”

Transforming employee access to information

The Founda project is being delivered in phases. The 2021 pilot brought on 7,000 users, 10,000 joined in the next wave, with a further 23,000 through 2023. As of May 2024, nearly 70,000 Danone employees have access to MyDanone. The remainder will be onboarded by the end of the year ensuring that the ServiceNow platform touches every “Danoner’s moments that matter.”

Gregory is pleased by the progress, but the onboarding figures don’t tell the full story. As with any global standardisation project, where a central team replaces local processes—processes that may have been well-liked—success is best judged by how employees have embraced the new approach. MyDanone is built to constantly evolve, but even its earliest version is winning fans.

“Today, the increased employee satisfaction is reflected in a CSAT score of 4.7 and 78% of employees say the content is useful. What pleases me most is that employees are finding the answers they need,” Gregory says. “Around one-third of tickets into the help desk are being solved via self-service. When we do have issues to resolve, the average time taken has dropped from two weeks to just two days.”

Redirecting resource to Danone’s core purpose

There has also been an undeniable boost in productivity. Through consistent processes, automation and self-service, employees are spending less time on straightforward tasks and more on higher-value priorities.

Pointing employees to the most relevant content in the knowledge base has improved employee productivity while reducing costs, enabling a €600,000 saving in help desk costs, and in the UK, 32% of onboarding processes are now automated. Automating Time and Attendance requests has saved 14,000 hours while streamlining invoice status processing in procurement has cut 1,000 hours from back-office workloads. This is valuable time and resource that is now better directed to Danone’s core purpose.

Building an in-house centre of excellence

As Danone works closely with ServiceNow on the broader Founda project, Gregory says it is important to retain the company’s in-house expertise.

“Of course, we are happy to lean on ServiceNow, but we wanted our own Center of Excellence,” he says. “It’s important that our team speaks the language of the business and understands the reasons for current processes. Our external partners add to that expertise.”

Quarterly business reviews with ServiceNow underpin the project’s success, and the focus for Gregory is on reviewing progress and looking ahead. “ServiceNow is very proactive in its support,” he adds. “They don’t just answer our questions, they find new questions to ask. They’re great at finding blind spots!”

Embracing AI to make content more engaging and personal

One of the biggest topics for discussion is the impact of GenAI, and Gregory sees obvious use cases on ServiceNow’s AI platform for business transformation. For example, in helping extract maximum value from the 3,000 articles—and counting—in the current knowledge base.

“It’s important that we democratise the content,” he adds. “GenAI can tailor content to an individual, perhaps even suggesting appropriate content before the individual has to ask.”

He continues: “I’d like users to be able to ask any question, in their language and their style, and have the best possible answer in return—as if they were speaking to a colleague.” This way, Danone will be able to take advantage of human-AI collaboration.

Business success through scale, agility and innovation

Our work with ServiceNow, Gregory continues, is a demonstration of the scale, agility and innovation commitments of the Renew Danone strategy. It is also evidence that the company can work at a global scale while respecting local differences.

"For the first time, employees have one place where they can access all things Danone—an experience that might previously have been overwhelming".

With less time lost searching for correct information, employees are more productive, happier and more fulfilled.

"Founda is also evidence that in collaboration with the DBS team, we can successfully deliver global projects", Gregory concludes. "It's been a game-changer".