Danone adopts continuous approach to organizational development

Danone is a multinational food and beverage company that sells products in 120 countries around the world. Following the latest in a series of large-scale business restructures, the company decided to take a new, continuous design approach to organizational development to remove the need for costly, reactive, high-risk transformation projects.

“Our aspiration is for Danone to end its company-wide transformation approach,” said Vincent Favre, Global Organizational Development Director at Danone. “We believe that by instead taking an ‘always-on’ approach, we can minimize disruption to the business, better react to changing organizational demands and, most importantly, better support our workforce.”

By strengthening its center of excellence for organizational development, Danone has shortened its planning cycles from annual to quarterly and introduced continuous tracking of its workforce demand and supply.

Accelerated organizational design: modeling the future in half the time

Having worked with Orgvue to establish a scalable project architecture, Danone enhanced its internal organizational development capability. The company introduced a new human resources process into its monitoring and assessment system by converting its existing transformation framework into an environment optimized for continuous performance review.

After migrating its position dataset from a previous transformation project into this new environment, the Danone team began to refine and optimize its Orgvue data packs by reducing the number of properties and improving calculation logic to more accurately link employees to positions. Now Danone always has a clear and up-to-date picture of its workforce.

With its new performance review framework in place, Danone’s Orgvue user community can now identify and assess opportunities for organizational efficiency, alignment with business priorities and people challenges, and plan design changes accordingly. They can also track organizational and position vacancy forecasts to close gaps between workforce demand and supply.

A data-driven foundation for faster change decisions

In a recent project, Danone used Orgvue to merge data from 30 different sources across 16 geographic regions, 11 functional units, and 3 business units to produce a single, integrated dataset that provides a centralized view of the entire organization. As a result, the company now has a data-driven foundation that enables faster decisions on organizational structure, leading to more effective outcomes.

Danone has also integrated Orgvue with its global human resources information system, simplifying workflow and enabling native data migration for real-time modeling and analytics. Daily data refreshes ensure accurate ‘people to position’ tracking as part of the company’s new business-as-usual approach to organizational design and workforce planning.

Importantly, the organizational development center of excellence has been equipped to serve different geographies with the processes, methods, tools, and data to make the right decisions for local markets, rather than being a centralized “tower of control”.

Redesigning organizational structure through alignment with workforce planning

Using Orgvue, Danone can now conduct analysis of every design model that it proposes for structural change. It can also forecast changes in workforce demand more accurately, redeploying talent effectively, creating or redesigning roles, and better managing costs.

Danone’s new approach to organizational development enables better planning, risk management, and responsiveness to a changing business environment. This new platform sets the stage for the company’s next goal: an integrated workforce planning process that embraces future organizational and talent needs.