Asana helps Danone roll out their global digital transformation

Highlights

Challenge

• Before Asana, Danone teams used email, spreadsheets, and a mix of apps to manage projects. It was difficult to get visibility into work, leading teams to work in silos.

• As Danone set out on an ambitious digital transformation journey, teams needed a way to standardize and track implementation progress on a global scale without getting bogged down in complexities. 

• As different teams embarked on digital transformation initiatives, they needed a solution to keep aligned and moving forward.

Solution

• Different teams across Danone adopted Asana as their work management platform, using it as a go-to source where they could see and track the work being done. 

• These teams use Asana to execute on digital transformation initiatives and see their timelines, dependencies, and performance across markets.

• Relying on Asana as a central source of truth, many teams at Danone are able to foster better collaboration, keep teams aligned, and standardize workflows.

Outcomes 

• Global cost savings: Drive digital transformation initiatives across markets in Asana, with the ability to report on progress and cost savings globally.

• Standardized program rollout: Developed and use project templates to efficiently replicate program implementation in each market and production facility.

• Drove digital transformation globally: Uses Asana to capture implementation history at different sites, allowing teams to quickly iterate on digital transformation initiatives for future sites and regions.

Asana makes everything shareable, which saves us time executing programs because it’s so much easier to replicate and learn from what others have done.”

Navigating the digital transformation journey in manufacturing

Digitalizing factory processes at scale

Danone aims to inspire healthier and more sustainable eating and drinking practices, and believes that food produced responsibly can restore the planet’s health. Their Nature Agenda includes carbon neutrality, regenerative agriculture, water stewardship, and a circular economy for food packaging. Danone contributes to the United Nations Sustainable Development goals and aims to become one of the first multinational companies to obtain B Corp ™ certification by 2025.

In 2019, Danone began their digital transformation initiative to digitalize 40 factories in Europe. The Global Digital Manufacturing team aimed to bring software and automation to the company’s factories, operations, and internal services, helping them make progress on their objectives as well as improve sustainability, safety, and productivity. 

Each facility goes through a two- to three-year journey to reach the future vision, with new solutions like automated guided vehicles (AGVs) to move pallets around a warehouse, sensors to detect temperature changes, and “cobots”—collaborative robots that work on the production line alongside humans. 

Each factory evolution is managed in Asana, moving through stages like ideation, solution design, and coaching local staff on the technology. It is a highly cross-functional effort, with the Digital Manufacturing team collaborating with groups like Operations, Supply Chain, Digital, Quality, Engineering, Maintenance, and HR.

Standardized processes to transform each factory

• The implementation process is captured in an Asana template, which the team duplicates to create a new Asana project when bringing an initiative to a factory.

• Each Asana project holds tasks to represent each digitalization idea, with subtasks for action items.

• Teams can easily share learnings between factories. because Asana captures implementation history, questions, and issues at each site.

Reporting on factory rollouts around the world 

• The Asana projects that represent digital manufacturing initiatives around the world use custom fields to display status and metadata—and Asana rules automatically change the custom field values when a new task is added to a project.

• These data points feed into dashboards created with the Power BI integration: one for each factory site and a global dashboard to show the total number of projects in flight, total costs, and annual global cost savings projections.

• The team also uses the Instagantt integration to view rollouts in a Gantt chart, with bidirectional updates between Instagantt and Asana.

• These tools give the team visibility into all programs happening globally and the ability to report on digitalization performance for Danone leadership such as the COO and digitalization VPs.

To increase performance at a 126-year-old medical nutrition factory in the Netherlands, we clustered over 300 digital transformation ideas into 33 solutions as Asana projects, then put them in a roadmap for 2025. We track these projects in an Asana portfolio for good execution.”

Optimizing global operations

Streamlining business services for efficiency and clarity

Danone’s Integrated Business Services (IBS) team delivers professional services and solutions to Danone employees, customers, and suppliers, including HR technology, supplier procure-to-pay, and data management tools. The initiative began in 2019 and rolled out to 16 geographies by 2022, with over 300 Danoners working on the effort.

Enhanced global deployment workflows

• The team uses Asana to track IBS go-live in new geographies, which they organize in an Asana portfolio called the “IBS Geographies Gap Roadmap.”

• Teammates use  templates to share progress updates in a consistent way across markets. This data feeds into Asana reporting dashboards, which are used to create consolidated updates for leadership.

• The availability of this information in Asana eliminates the need for status emails and meetings, and makes it easy to see who is working on what via Asana task assignments—which was especially useful when IBS teammates began working remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Asana gives me the ability to quickly create charts, track status, and zoom in on certain aspects of a project without having to export the data to spreadsheets.”

Shaping the digital marketing journey

Implementing digital marketing technology across the globe

Danone’s Global Marketing Technology team equips local marketing departments with software to create digital experiences. They tailor solutions to the needs of teams in over 12 markets, working with local IT, central IT, and agencies to implement the software. 

Centralized marketing efforts

• The team’s program roadmap lives in Asana, and every software solution has a dedicated Asana portfolio or project to manage its implementation.

• Each market is represented as a milestone and custom fields designate their priority level. 

• By using Asana as a home base to clarify and communicate all timelines, responsibilities, and dependencies, teammates and stakeholders know what success looks like and deliver what’s needed on deadline.

Danone’s next century of health through food

As Danone steps into a new age of productivity, Asana keeps teams connected across functions and countries, working together toward their mission to bring health through food to as many people as possible.

As the company continues on its path toward a more sustainable future, it will continue to use Asana to manage its digital transformation, decrease its footprint, and share learnings between markets. With a new foundation in place for the next 100 years of business, the company can work efficiently toward their vision of “One Planet. One Health.”—reflecting their belief that the health of the people and the health of the planet are interconnected.