Danone

KPMG firms and ServiceNow help Danone build a people-centered global business services platform focused on process efficiency.

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In pursuit of service excellence, silos make way for a single, seamless corporate support model.

The opportunity: Overcoming outdated processes in favor of harmonization and simplification.

Danone is a world-leading food and beverage company, with about 100,000 employees in over 55 countries. United by Danone’s purpose — to bring health through food to as many people as possible — its leaders recognized that to be able to serve the total needs of the organization, digital transformation was imperative.

Faced with the challenge of reducing business services complexity and replacing outdated and disparate systems and processes with more efficient, automation-enabled self-service, the company approached KPMG firms in France and the UK to help.

"Many of our systems had aged over time. These legacy systems were holding back our people and our potential. The target was to standardize, simplify, harmonize, and autonomize our service lines to deliver a better experience to Danoners everywhere in the world."

Francois-Xavier Lacroix
SVP Danone Business Services Worldwide


Our response: Improving service quality for employees can lead to customer satisfaction.

Employee experience is fundamental to, and underlies, customer experience. Finding the point where the two intersect can lead to positive business outcomes.

Leveraging KPMG professionals’ experience in technology-enabled process improvement, the project team looked for ways to integrate and optimize its business services using the KPMG Target Operating Model. This model sits at the core of the KPMG Powered Enterprise Global Business Services (GBS) solution and gives organizations the ability to transform the user experience with data-driven personalization functionality, while helping to facilitate enterprise-wide efficiency and productivity.

Danone had already migrated to ServiceNow’s platform for IT services to begin the process and was now ready to implement an enterprise-wide ServiceNow solution. The goal was to combine all services into a single organizational structure underpinned by KPMG’s business process optimization model.

The resulting Danone solution is called ‘Founda!’, and is designed to drive efficiency across HR, finance, procurement and master data management. Enabled by the ServiceNow Enterprise Service Management platform, Founda! provides end-to-end visibility from request through to resolution. More than this, it acts as a critical cross-functional enabler for integrated business services, resulting in process harmonization and consolidation, as well as significant cost savings.

"With KPMG Powered Enterprise GBS enabled by ServiceNow technology, Danone is now able to manage the full scope of Danone employees’ service requests through an intuitive, always-on and mobile-first digital interface."

René Vader
Advisory Global Head of Clients & Markets
KPMG International


The outcome: United in purpose and performance.

From the outset of the transformation project, Danone’s leaders sought to improve the day-to-day experience of its business services for employees, knowing this would help drive operational efficiency in key business functions, including Finance and HR. However, the Founda! solution at Danone has gone beyond this single deliverable. In creating end-to-end, automation-enabled and customer-centric process flows across all its functions and geographies, Founda! has helped motivate, unify and connect Danone’s people. With data no longer trapped in silos but readily and safely shared across teams, data insights are contributing to strategic innovation and problem-solving. 

"We set out to develop a One Danone Business Services (OneDBS) — a single, unifying portal for our people to access business services in ways that would drive efficiency and create value. This we have achieved. Even more important, we now have a platform that positions us for future growth."

Francois-Xavier Lacroix
SVP Danone Business Services Worldwide

The KPMG Powered GBS solution, enabled by ServiceNow, creates a single system of action for Danone employees. This centralizing aspect helps drive engagement by elevating users out of a labyrinth of complex systems of record. With a focus on mobile and self-service enablement, cases can be deflected and resolved, freeing up agents’ time to concentrate on other tasks. Another advantage lies in the solution’s operational performance reporting capabilities, again helping to drive a customer-centric culture. For organizations like Danone, the difference that KPMG Powered GBS enabled by ServiceNow makes helps to serve the ultimate goal — sustainable growth in a digital future.

Our people

René Vader

Advisory Global Head of Clients & Markets

KPMG International

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