Unwieldy and disconnected UC environments can lead to increased IT costs, greater security and compliance risks, a drop in productivity and poor user experience. An agile digital workspace is essential for aligning teams, breaking down data silos and enhancing collaboration to support a hybrid workforce.
Operations unified on a single platform
“Many organizations have accelerated their shift to digital technologies by adopting UC&C solutions that incorporate connectivity services and keep data in motion and yield benefits to the employee and customer experience, deliver cost-effectiveness and agility of business activities and enable flexible work,” explains Rich Costello, senior research analyst, Unified Communications and Collaboration at IDC.
“The most successful UC&C solutions will be those that are future-proofed in that they support interoperability with the major UC collaboration environments and can incorporate future AI innovations and integrations with a growing set of adjacent solutions critical to employee and customer engagement, such as contact center as a service (CCaaS) and communication platform as a service (CPaaS).”
Snack food giant Mondelēz International is one such example. The multinational has transformed its legacy infrastructure into a digital workspace platform, enabling global communications and collaboration while incorporating analytics and AI to enhance the customer experience and personalize services to satisfy employee needs.
A significant transformation
Mondelēz International engaged Orange Business to implement its ambitious consolidated UC plan to transform communications and collaboration across all its sites, from offices and factories to warehouses and call centers, utilizing an all-digital communications platform built on Microsoft Teams.
This was no small task. The multinational, responsible for such well-known brands as Cadbury, Milka, Ritz, Philadelphia and Toblerone, is one of the largest snack companies in the world, with global net revenues of approximately $36 billion in 2023 and operating across 200+ locations in 80 countries with over 91,000 employees globally.
“Mondelēz’s existing communications environment was very complex. We had a disparate ecosystem of partners and vendors, and each had unique technologies deployed in the 80 countries. We wanted to consolidate all of this to a single platform managed by a single reliable partner,” explained Punit Jain, CTO AMEA, Global Digital Workspace Lead at Mondelēz International.
“We wanted a partner with global outreach and credibility in the market. We were also looking for a partner that had very strong execution abilities, and Orange Business, together with their own strong project management team and their deep partnership with Microsoft, proved to be the perfect partner to execute this globally,” added Jain.
Over an 18-month period, a team of 75 Orange Business consultants worked on the project, addressing three key areas: voice, video and the contact center. The Mondelēz, Microsoft and Orange Business teams worked closely together on the project from the beginning to carefully manage change.
Operations are now on a single global platform, with Orange Business managing the entire Microsoft Teams deployment. This includes taking over the multinational’s global communications end to end, including unique voice capabilities in markets such as China, India and the Middle East.
Better collaboration and communication with a single, global platform
The transformation will be completed this year, but Mondelēz has already seen major benefits. “Transforming the global operations to the single unified platform, which comes with advanced security and vulnerability management tools, ensures that our environment is highly secure,” explains Jain.
“It has brought our costs significantly down; the line monitoring of the trends enables us to change and remove features according to the usage patterns that we see. Our IT support has been significantly optimized and simplified, and our user experience ratings have come up from 3.7 out of 5 to almost 4.9 out of 5, which means happy employees and a happy enterprise,” concludes Jain.
To learn more about how Mondelēz International has transformed its global unified communications into an all-digital workspace with Orange Business, watch the video here.
Jan has been writing about technology for over 22 years for magazines and web sites, including ComputerActive, IQ magazine and Signum. She has been a business correspondent on ComputerWorld in Sydney and covered the channel for Ziff-Davis in New York.