Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines division of the multinational pharmaceutical company Sanofi operates in an industry with very strict guidelines. It’s also a massive company, with around 14,000 employees working in more than 10 sites across the world. Today, Sanofi Pasteur’s head of Quality Innovation and Engagement Celine Schillinger published a new customer testimonial on Microsoft’s Office blog to explain how the company leveraged Yammer to reduce costs while improving safety and quality.
Pushing so many employees to adopt an enterprise social networking service is definitely not an easy challenge. “Too often, corporate social networks are seen as not having real business value,” explained Schillinger. The company started by creating a large Yammer group of employees with a “quality mindset” who used the service to share ideas and best practices. Promoting collaboration throughout the company quickly lead to costs savings and more, as the exec explained:
The result was an outpouring of innovation, such as an operator who saved his manufacturing unit more than €100,000 (US $105,000) by changing the way a particular material was handled in the production process, or a shop floor manager who has created a way to empower shop floor operators around key pillars of the production, thus reducing human errors by 91 percent.
More importantly, Schillinger highlighted that adopting Yammer helped Sanofi Pasteur to create an “engaged workplace culture,” breaking the pre-existing siloed company structure along the way. “Today, everyone has the opportunity to share their experiences on Yammer more openly, creating a rich resource of insights from every individual, regardless of title or level within the company.” Moreover, the exec highlighted the importance of Yammer’s mobile apps and multilingual translators to break barriers between all employees.
Overall, adopting the enterprise social networking service allowed the company to make quality improvements and transform the company’s culture, explained the exec. “The result exceeded our expectations,” she concluded. You can find the full case study on Microsoft’s Customer Stories website, let us know in the comments if you think the adoption of an enterprise social network can really change how a company operates.
