pladis
pladis is one of the world’s fastest growing snacking companies and home to much loved brands including McVitie’s, GODIVA and Ülker. pladis also owns regional brands Jacob’s, Go Ahead, Flipz, Turtles, BN, Verkade and many more products across sweet and savoury biscuits, wafer, cake, and chocolate.
Formed in 2016, pladis is the proud steward of over 300 years of family baking and confectionery experience. The expertise of its 16,000-strong global workforce spans 25 factories in 11 countries, and is founded on collaboration, agility and resilience.
As a responsible business, delivering the highest quality products and exceptional service, pladis’ products have the potential to reach more than four billion people across the world.
Yildiz Holding brought together its core biscuit and confectionary businesses Godiva Chocolatier, Ulker, United Biscuits and DeMet Candy Company to form a new global company, pladis. This created CEEMEA’s largest food company boasting over 350 years of family brand heritage.
With this came the challenge of uniting 26,000 people, based at 34 sites across 13 countries. This new, global business needed to collaborate seamlessly across their sites and they chose M365 as their digital workplace platform to enable this.
pladis quickly realised that in conjunction with their technical project to facilitate the roll out they would require a strategy to drive skills and adoption. However, the global, disparate nature of their business meant it was going to be a challenge that required an innovative solution.
pladis turned to Combined Knowledge, a MaivenPoint company and their Training+ M365 Azure app to complement their technical project for rolling out M365. The solution provided high-quality, 1080P, modular M365 video learning accessible within the M365 environment. Employees could self-serve this learning at their desks or on the move, allowing them to build skills continually, stay agile, and keep up with the latest M365 developments. Essential learning was pushed to the power user group for immediate business support, while the wider population could pull learning as needed.
Before the go live day, Combined Knowledge helped create an early adopters' community where they could share their learnings, a place where users are incentivised to ask questions, and generally build a community that aids effective work. We also arrange weekly sessions with each of the site ads to get them ready to go live in the weeks leading up.
Combined Knowledge facilitated the go-live process for over 3,000 users in the UK and Ireland. They provided on-the-spot assistance to users encountering any issues, reducing the number of calls to pladis' service desk. Also provide training sessions to make it easier for the staff from different departments to adapt M365. Through face to face sessions and on-line sessions, pladis staff are able to use OneDrive and get everything in one place and easily get the resources whenever they want.
pladis employees are now able to self-serve, high quality 1080P, modularise M365 video learning at their desk or on the move from within their M65 environment. This approach not only provides the base level of knowledge each employee requires, it also allows them to continually build their skills, remain agile and up to date with all of the latest M365 developments. The benefit realisation is immediate as pladis are able to push essential learning to their power user group to help them provide instant business support as well as allowing the wider population to pull learning as and when required.
Training+ has helped pladis drive true benefit from their M365 adoption, ensuring a smooth transition to their new digital workplace was achieved with minimal disruption to business as usual. They are now also reaping the benefits of ongoing, up to date training content at their fingertips. All achieved in a cost effective way without the traditional classroom training headaches of cost, travel and time away from the office.
