From siloed teams to a global collaboration culture - Arvato is undergoing a culture change supported by Microsoft 365

As a global supply chain management company, Arvato has a vast amount of knowledge and long-term partnerships with clients in the fashion and lifestyle, beauty, tech and healthcare industries. The company focuses on speed and the use of innovative technologies, as befits any business tasked with delivering goods and navigating supply chains. “We have to be fast and precise in our decisions,” says Dr. Dietmar Guhe, Vice President Cloud IT & Infrastructure at Arvato. To connect knowledge experts across Arvato (and the world), the company has adopted Microsoft Teams as a central tool as part of its business-critical devotion to doing things quickly. ”We use Microsoft Teams to bring together the spirit of our company with a platform that supports that spirit,” says Guhe. Arvato also uses Microsoft Power BI to accelerate data visualization for both internal and external parties. “Microsoft 365 helps us to bring our knowledge together, faster and with a greater reach,” says Guhe.

Guhe continues, “For example, colleagues on a different continent recently contacted me about a time-sensitive request from a client. They needed answers to some highly technical questions and used Teams to help find experienced colleagues in the company who could help. Within three hours, we had coauthored a brilliant document to send to the client, and the feedback was great.”

Accessing knowledge from a wider community to achieve faster outcomes

For Arvato, choosing Microsoft 365 is part of how the company plans to orient itself towards the future. Frank Schirrmeister, CEO of  Arvato, explains: "The introduction of the cloud-based Modern Workplace client and M365 App suite has had a game changing impact on the way we collaborate and the speed of our business.  It has become the foundation to substantially improve our knowledge sharing, efficiency, security and collaboration - for our clients as well as for our employees worldwide."

In the past, creating alignment across such a large company was challenging, especially with a mixed technology landscape that hindered calendar visibility and other collaboration. “We’re now all together on one platform,” observes Matthias Driller, Business Manager to the CEO at Arvato. “The move to Teams and Microsoft 365 helps our business by supporting fast, informed decision-making and is having a huge impact on our collaboration across countries.”

In addition to using Teams to collaborate across business areas in the moment of need, colleagues at Arvato also use the tool to create dedicated expert groups to help unlock collective intelligence. “We know there’s knowledge available within the company,” says Guhe. “We use Teams to connect the people who have this knowledge on one platform so a discussion can start.” The development represents a culture change at Arvato. Colleagues are widening their networks and looking outside their immediate surroundings for information. Guhe notes, “employees no longer only ask questions of the people sitting next to them. They use Teams to ask questions of the broader community.”  

In the days before Teams, gathering insights was more time-consuming. “Writing emails and waiting for responses, taking phone calls, emailing documents, printing them, writing comments, scanning, sending them back – it was a slower way of working,” says Guhe. Instead, Arvato colleagues use Teams to facilitate lightning-fast worldwide collaboration, tapping experts in various countries to come together on projects that would have been siloed in the past. “We have concepts written by our Dutch colleagues that our French and Polish colleagues are helping roll out while we do the governance here in Germany,” he says. “This is how we work together nowadays.” According to Stefan Koehne, IT Director Platform Services and SAP Architect at Arvato, increased visibility across a global network of employees boosts efficiency overall, cuts down on duplicate work, and helps spread best practices. “Before, when we just had local knowledge, there was a risk that colleagues were doing the same thing twice because everyone was focused on their own tasks without visibility into their colleagues’ experiences,” Koehne recalls.

Opening up the business to new talent and embracing hybrid work

Arvato has also expanded the geographic reach of its search for talent by using Teams. “Years ago, we would say, ‘OK, we have a specific site and we need to hire people who live in the area,’” says Guhe. “It’s hard to find qualified employees and even harder when you’re confined to a small area. We use Teams to widen the scope of hiring practices and offer more flexibility.” 

The ability to work remotely, or more flexibly, has created a new focus area for leadership at Arvato. “Our new, modern workplace has opened up topics we never touched before,” says Driller. “We’re now talking about topics like remote leadership, which was not part of our mindset before Teams.” Using Teams to increase agility and hire more widely helps future-proof the business. Says Guhe, “I love how using the Teams platform, we not only work more effectively and flexibly but also are better prepared for the future.” Koehne and his colleagues had a direct experience with turning to Teams to respond to the unknown when they used the platform to launch a global project to migrate on-premises SAP resources to Azure in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We used Teams to work in a decentralized way, collaborating across continents to keep the project running in a remote manner,” he says. “If we didn’t have Teams, we might have had to stop the project or postpone it indefinitely.”

Launching new, time-saving methods for data reporting and analytics

Arvato recently set out to streamline reporting and provide better transparency for clients. It launched a new data visualization project, dubbed “Fireworks,” and used Power BI to create a client-facing data analytics and reporting process that could work across countries and include the security inherent in the Microsoft 365 environment. “Our clients want to see and understand metrics like how many goods were sent from a given warehouse on a particular day,” says Koehne. In the past, Arvato compiled and sent those reports to clients manually, which amounted to thousands of emails every day. “We spent a lot of money just creating and sending out reports,” adds Koehne. “But with Power BI and our Fireworks project, we’ve standardized and simplified the process. All the developers who focused on data analysis in the past now focus on other things.”

Guhe also uses Power BI to create reports destined for an internal audience and to gain insights. “For example, we use Power BI to track incidents reported to our IT ticket system,” he says. “We can see things like how many printer disruptions we have.” Guhe uses the built-in AI capabilities in Power BI to perform analysis, identifying trends like a high number of Wi-Fi related issues at a single warehouse location. “Using Power BI helps me strategically organize my department,” he continues. “Not only do I have data available, but the tool also helps me use AI to quickly analyze that data and distribute resources more effectively. Without it, this information could be lost amid thousands of tickets."

Leading the way for more empowering, efficient ways of working

Since the company embraced its Microsoft tools, Guhe has seen the IT department at Arvato evolve from a support organization to one that’s leading a culture change and inspiring colleagues through training and innovation. Arvato employees are already familiar with Microsoft Power Apps and chatbots in Teams. Guhe and his team now aim to empower employees to use the technology to create their own, personalized applications. “We’re encouraging all employees to use these technologies to make their work easier,” he says. It’s all part of Arvato’s ongoing goal to become ever-more global. “As we become more global, it’s part of our strategy to bring people together, harmonize on one platform, and encourage everyone to create solutions and share their knowledge,” says Guhe. With the addition of Teams and Power BI, that strategy is already having results. “Today, employees feel that they‘re part of a bigger story,” says Guhe. “It’s less me, more us.”

Find out more about Arvato on LinkedIn.