Bonduelle case study

How Bonduelle migrated their quality, best practices and agronomic analysis documents into an intranet portal powered by AODocs.

Business description

Bonduelle, a sharing culture.

Family business founded in 1853, Bonduelle aims to ensure good living by the vegetable food. Vegetables, grown on 128,000 hectares, are marketed in 100 countries under different brands in different channels and in all technologies. Featuring a unique agro-industrial know-how with 57 industrial sites and agricultural self-production, Bonduelle produces on the best growing areas, closer to its customers.In 2014, 3,500 employees worldwide were using Google Apps.

Business and technical challenge

The Bonduelle Group moved to Google Apps in early 2013 to offer collaborative and harmonized tools to all their employees.

The strategy of the IT department was to offer a complete cloud platform solution to their business users, but at that time, a large legacy of information was managed in different platforms including Lotus Notes databases and the content management system Plone.

A few months after the deployment of Google Apps, the decision was taken to look for a document management solution that would be common to the whole group.

Marie-Charlotte Bouchery, Chief Technology Officer of Bonduelle, told us of their requirements “we focused our search on a solution that could be integrated into the Google platform. For us, it was natural to find a DMS that fit our strategy of offering a collaboration platform based on Google Apps.”

The challenge for the Group was to find a product which offered the end-user a point of entry through their Google account, but at the same time, a product offering the possibility to manage and edit Microsoft Office documents. “The possibility to let users choose between editing Google documents or historical Office documents was a major requirement in our search for the best solution”, said M.C. Bouchery.

After looking and testing different products, AODocs was finally chosen by Bonduelle, first as a pilot with their sensitive agricultural department and for the migration of their Plone and Lotus Notes databases.

Our integrated solution

In June 2013, a pilot was launched with the agricultural department. The team, composed of 20 members in Spain, France, Germany and Italy, was sharing and editing sensitive documents in a portal, called eSpace built on the Plone system. Around 5,000 documents, essentially quality documents, best practices and agronomic analysis were accessible from this portal to a further 60 people, for consultation.

The challenge for this project was to provide an instant and secured access to the documents with the new solution, but also to maintain a portal for delivering other information, such as weather forecasts, alerts and corporate messages.

To fit these requirements, we proposed a solution including our AODocs Document Portal, Google Sites and Google Groups.
AODocs, is built on top of Google Drive, and stores the documents on a Bonduelle Google Drive account, non accessible to the users. When a document is created or uploaded by a user, the ownership is automatically transferred to this account, and retention policies are applied by AODocs to prevent accidental document deletion.
Sharing permissions are set, locked and managed by key persons (administrators) at folder level, where dedicated Google Groups are applied.
An AODocs view is embedded on the new portal, built on Google Sites.

With this integration, the business user has a single point of entry to access all information relative to agronomy. On the same page of the Google Site, the collaborator can access documents shared with him and can access other information, important for his daily work, including supply disruption alerts or links to specialized weather forecast websites.

The migration of the legacy documents was carried out over a weekend and documents were accessible to business users the following Monday. At the same time, the Plone database was changed to a read-only status. The technical challenge during this phase was to run migration as quickly as possible to ensure that documents would be available at the first business hour, with the latest changes available.

Bonduelle business benefits

A year after this implementation, 5,667 documents are stored in the AODocs library and are accessed by users in 4 different countries.

Users are confident in creating and accessing documents on the platform, as they are sure that appropriate permissions are applied to their documents. The key factor for these users was to access the latest information in real time without losing any functionality.

This is something they appreciate in the new solution they are using. Complex Excel documents have been migrated and are still editable in Microsoft Office. When saved, the latest version is instantaneously accessible through the portal.
According to David Cazals, it is still too early to give quantitative gains, but the qualitative benefits are real: “Today, we have a global platform. In the morning, users can connect at the same time to Gmail, Google Drive, and AODocs. And this is a real satisfaction for the users.”

Following the success of this first experience, Bonduelle has started to migrate their Lotus Notes and Plone databases to AODocs for 500 users following an internal analysis to reduce the number of databases to migrate. This project gave them the opportunity to run an inventory and to clean up useless databases no longer being used by the Group.

Marie-Charlotte Bouchery can see a lot of different cases and opportunities where they will use AODocs in the future to offer a more harmonized environment. One of these opportunities will be to close Lotus Notes and the File Servers.

A pilot will start in the next few weeks in Brazil to create and migrate a secured corporate folder structure of sensitive collaborative documents accessible through Google Drive, and secured by AODocs.

With AODocs working as a platform, and especially thanks to the workflow editor of AODocs, the IT department can see a lot of possibilities they were not aware existed when they chose AODocs: “With AODocs, we can now answer business needs more easily, thanks to the flexibility and the multiple applications possible with this solution. For example, the workflow engine of AODocs will allow us to cover other diverse needs like processes for Human Resources, or for the management of our contracts. We also believe that AODocs will help us in a future transition to Chromebook.”