Givaudan employs over 9,000 staff in more than 40 countries at 80 sites and is one of Switzerland’s top 30 companies in terms of market capitalization.
A great deal of information content, both physical and electronic, is generated in the development, testing, manufacture and supply of Givaudan products. Keeping track of the multitude of documents and data, ensuring that record keeping practices are adhered to and that information can be quickly and easily located is a monumental task. Over the years, Givaudan has used a variety of systems to meet its needs, including mainframes, each with their own support and maintenance costs. Business process automation plays a key part in keeping the business running, and Givaudan was confident that a better way of working was possible.
Defining a strategy for a single solution and a single source of accurate information
Givaudan had already undertaken a global, strategic project to standardize and consolidate multiple IT systems into a single enterprise-wide SAP® system. This works well for structured content, but there was no similar strategy in place for unstructured content documents, scanned images, reports, etc. Having grown both organically and through acquisition, there was a multiplicity of systems, processes and procedures throughout the organization. These led to various approaches and solutions for creating, capturing, storing, managing and ultimately disposing of documentation.
This was causing a number of challenges including difficulty in collaboration within and across teams, often in different geographies. Information reporting and exchange was difficult at best. Searching was often slow and unreliable, with users unable to fully trust results, unsure if they were looking at the very latest version of a document. The growth of tools such as email only exacerbated the problem, with content being circulated, uncontrolled, as attachments, placing pressure on storage infrastructure, too.
Givaudan set out to develop a global strategy for content management, one that would deliver on the goal of a single source of accurate information, so users could have confidence in the content they were sharing. This strategy would encourage, rather than hinder, collaboration on a global scale ultimately leading to significant cost savings through consolidation of systems and also a reduction in support and maintenance costs. This included a significant reduction in the reliance on three Mainframe systems–which would eventually be decommissioned, saving millions of Swiss Francs every year.
Selecting the right partner for the long term
Givaudan recognized that implementing the dramatic changes of a new, single, enterprise-wide content management strategy would require a solid, reliable and proven solution provider. Certain criteria that had been defined by Givaudan reduced the number of potential organizations and Givaudan very much wanted the relationship to be partnership based rather than the traditional supplier-client setup.
Having already implemented the OpenText solution for SAP content archiving, Givaudan explored the ability of OpenText to deliver against their broader requirements. Key factors for Givaudan included the completeness of the OpenText Enterprise Information Management vision covering everything from document and data capture, to collaboration, to records management and web experience. Integration between SAP and OpenText Content Server and the length of time that OpenText has been providing such solutions were also key factors. Givaudan looked to the Gartner Magic Quadrant and evaluated a number of standout players in the market, but OpenText ultimately won the competitive bid process.
A further factor that led Givaudan to select OpenText was their extensive ecosystem of partners who have developed specialist or niche extensions to OpenText. Over time, Givaudan would implement a number of extensions to OpenText from numerous OpenText partners.