Trivium Packaging invests in personalized communications

A new way of communicating

Trivium Packaging―a multi-national company offering innovative and sustainable packaging solutions through scalable production―needed a way to connect with 7,500 employees in 20 countries and 60 locations while keeping them engaged in one of the company’s 16 official languages.

From a communications perspective, the SharePoint-based intranet was a file repository rather than an engaging communication channel and Trivium couldn’t reach 50% of its workforce because they didn’t have a company device or direct email.

“The only way that I was able to communicate with employees was by sending an email to a manager and have them print out that email and post it on a bulletin board in their factory,” says Ann Halvorsen, VP of Global Communications at Trivium Packaging.

Trivium considered many options for an employee portal, but integrating any of them would take too many internal resources. It needed an out-of-the-box solution that would work immediately without additional integrations and that would allow the company to focus on local and targeted content.

ServiceNow was the obvious choice, encouraged by IT who had experienced its own ServiceNow successes. “When we were searching for an answer, ServiceNow really stepped up. They showed us the employee portal and Employee Center Pro and I knew that this would work. Also, as an existing ServiceNow customer, leveraging what we already had made sense from an investment perspective,” explains Ann.

Inclusive and personalized communication

The company’s Employee Experience module implementation allows for multi-channel communications that are dynamic, engaging, and relevant to employees regardless of where they are or what language they speak.

“We try to make the content as interesting as possible,” says Ann. “We want to remove business-speak and jargon, and make people want to read it and make it their home page. With Employee Experience, we can target content, we’re building a network of global editors that can publish locally, and we have a translation functionality that is kickass.”

Trivium worked with ServiceNow partner, SD Worx, to create a modern intranet platform with a custom newsfeed widget, delivering personalized, omni-channel communications. The content, which used to be sporadic and lacked points of interest for employees, was replaced by regular posts―often created locally―that can be automatically translated into 16 languages when requested by the user.

“Now we have the ability to change content on a regular basis,” says Ann. “We add news articles daily, and we run campaigns when big things happen. These options just didn’t exist before. And we’re also trying to connect that content and promote it elsewhere, for example, to the TV screens in the plants.”

Although the legacy SharePoint-based portal was replaced by Employee Center Pro, employees can still manage and collaborate on files within SharePoint through ServiceNow. And, in the meantime, a simple banner with “Where did my SharePoint go?” links to an informative and educational campaign, driving the changes home.

The new look, feel, and approach are clearly working. “I can see the number of people reading the articles increasing,” says Ann. “People are engaging with it, liking, and commenting. We’re changing communication within Trivium. We’re miles ahead of where we were already, but I think we’re just stepping into where we should be. And we have the platform and the foundation in place. Now we just need to build on it.”

Soon, the company will be able to reach all of its employees through personal device access and drive proactive communications to everyone, whether they work at a desk or on a plant floor.

Growth through challenges

The new portal is a success for communications, but it can also support other departments. “We started using the Employee Center to communicate outages or maintenance,” says Yasmine ElSawi, Global Service Manager of Group IT at Trivium Packaging. “We can send prompts to encourage employees to do software upgrades or request IT support. We didn’t have this kind of worldwide communication before and it has a very positive impact on the IT department as well as users.”

This change is significant and shows how the two departments have been supporting each other throughout the ServiceNow journey. Because Trivium’s beginnings weren’t easy.

“Forming a company out of two different companies, that’s hard enough as it is,” says Ann. “And then the pandemic hit us, then inflation, and then a cyberattack. So, if you put all of that together, it was very difficult.”

Although the company had planned to build its own secure IT department over several years, Trivium was forced to do it in a matter of weeks. “We had an outsourced company before, but we now wanted something that we could manage ourselves,” says Yasmine. “And we had to move quickly.”

“We’re private equity owned, so we’re very much focused on efficiency and lean teams, and we have to prioritize this when making investments,” adds Ann. As a result, ServiceNow was chosen as the best option for the company’s requirements, beginning with IT Service Management (ITSM).

Efficiency through automation and visibility

Apart from building its IT from scratch, Trivium is taking full advantage of the visibility offered by the ServiceNow platform to fulfill its vision for digitization and automation, and search for inefficiencies. What’s more, a clear view of its processes provides Trivium with targeted improvements.

“ServiceNow helped me realize where more efficiencies are needed to reduce workloads, for example,” says Yasmine. “It helps with automation options through trends and analysis that we can access by simply looking at the dashboards and reports. Also, we didn’t have full reporting for all I.D. tickets in one place before. This is something that came with ServiceNow.”

Having everything in one place allows management to discuss investment decisions and future developments based on clear and transparent data. It also enables teams to solve problems quickly.

“We unified our processes because when you put everything in one place, you can drive problem management. For example, we could easily identify certain repetitive application errors and drive process improvements. That was very helpful not only from the visibility and process point of view but because it gives us the opportunity to learn as we go. It gives us a dynamic approach to fixing our problems.”

This initial success was the reason why the IT department encouraged leveraging ServiceNow and integrating Employee Center Pro when the company was looking for a new employee communication tool.

Continuing the journey

ServiceNow helps Trivium with service management and communications―whether that’s up-to-date procurement content or info on global HR vacancies―something that many other providers offer. This makes the Now Platform a one-stop shop for Trivium’s needs. But, most importantly, ServiceNow is enabling the company to channel its ambitions while rebuilding what was lost.

ServiceNow provided an easy-to-use platform to help the company on its way. And the relationship is growing with more collaboration planned in the future. “In ServiceNow, you can have all the ITIL disciplines completely managed and improved within,” says Yasmine. “We’re discussing putting our change management process into ServiceNow.”

The company is also working on simplifying the original build and, for internal communications, the plan is to keep expanding. “I’m just dying to get my hands on the new Pro platform. Because then it becomes almost an internal social media platform. It could benefit us from a business perspective and that to me is amazing.”