Everything from one source

Dhe Hochdorf Group is one of the Swiss market leaders in the development, production and marketing of valuable foods and ingredients made from milk, cereals and oilseeds. Founded in 1895, the long-established company is active in the areas of Dairy Ingredients, Baby Care and Cereals & Ingredients and employs over 625 people. With customers from the food industry and the wholesale and retail trade in 90 countries, the company generated sales of CHF 551 million in 2015. In the course of a reorganisation of the company structures, the project management software used for product development projects was increasingly reaching its limits due to organisational and process-related changes. In addition, the Qualiguide quality management system had reached its "end of life" - the supplier of the in-house development terminated support for the aging application. The latter was the driver for Kaspar Stiep, Head of IT & Services at Hochdorf, to start looking for a new solution in 2013. After evaluating various options, he finally decided on Sharepoint as the central platform for all information and collaboration applications in the company. "Most solutions quickly turned out to be unsuitable for our comprehensive purposes. The only one that came out ahead was a Swiss software for integrated management systems, he says. "If we'd only had to redo quality management, the chances for the solution would have been good." But since Stiep also wanted to map project management and various other applications on the new platform, the decision was clearly in favor of Sharepoint. In addition, Stiep pursues a procurement strategy based on Microsoft technologies wherever possible. Stiep justifies the choice of IOZ as IT service provider for the upcoming projects with the consistently positive feedback from customer references and the fact that IOZ is strongly anchored in the Sharepoint environment. "But we also got on well with the company's representatives right from the start, and the physical proximity to the IOZ domicile in Sursee is another positive side effect."

Intranet and quality management
So the first thing to do was to put quality management on a new footing. At the same time, the construction of the intranet was started at the end of May 2014, which is intended to serve as a central entry point for all employees for company information and the individual applications based on SharePoint. A special feature of the platform is a news center for internal communication, which, with the help of the Infoscreen app developed by IOZ, also reaches employees without a PC workstation on screens, for example in common rooms. At the beginning of December 2014, the old intranet system was finally shut down and the new one launched.

Little has changed in the Qualiguide with regard to release workflows. The definitions were jointly adapted to SharePoint conditions and implemented by IOZ in terms of administration and maintenance. The process representations were transferred from the old system by Hochdorf itself to the Sharepoint extension Visio. The Qualiguide button takes the user to the visually represented process landscape, which depicts the entire company. Before the project, Stiep had already established a process mindset among its employees, so that they are used to navigating to the desired, already stored work instructions, checklists, applicable documents, etc., not via a search slot, but by selecting the appropriate process. A special feature of the Qualiguide is that it offers a location-based view. In Sulgen, for example, the processes available there are displayed directly. With the successful certification according to ISO 22000:2005 FSSC at the end of 2015, the application Qualiguide could be handed over to the operational business.

A powerful tool called in
For the mapping of the approval processes, the workflow automation solution Nintex was used, for which IOZ is the first Swiss company with employees certified in this technology and products. Nintex not only provides a very user-friendly tool for capturing processes and workflows, it is also used wherever the standard workflow editor supplied with SharePoint is no longer sufficient. This is the case, for example, with tasks and maintenance or versioning. Workflows can be created manually and technically linked without development knowledge. Or when a new checklist is created using a template, metadata is stored in the document itself. This clearly defines, for example, who is the process or document owner and who may or must check, reject, delegate and release changes accordingly. Only then are newly defined processes and specification documents published in Qualiguide. Thanks to Nintex, it is easy to create a design library in which all versions and the people involved are documented. A complete traceability is therefore guaranteed at any time. In the new Qualiguide all process documentations including the applicable documents and document templates as well as all process responsibilities are stored. In addition, a workflow-supported release and approval process is mapped. For the future, Stiep has set itself the goal of handling further QM work such as audit management, complaint management or contract management via SharePoint.

An end to uncontrolled project management
The implementation of the project management solution began in August 2014. This application is primarily concerned with handling task management for releases and approvals with workflows for Hochdorf's recipe, process, packaging, and quality assurance projects, providing project rooms, and managing project-related information. The project management for formulation projects was the first to be tackled. Instead of dealing with dockets, folders and Excel lists, the user now accesses the application via the Sharepoint portal and starts a new project. As with the Qualiguide, forms and business logic are implemented with Nintex. The tool also uses the engine of Sharepoint here and enables the user to build workflows himself and to organise himself in a target-oriented way. Before the start of the project, approval is processed with the involvement of all the departments involved and then coordination is handled by means of workflows and the recording of tasks. All in all, the project went very well, says Stiep. "The colleagues from IOZ proved to be very pragmatic in their approach. For example, they recorded the requirements directly with the departments and delivered proposals that were ready for decision. I was never pulled over for trivialities," he says happily. Of course, there were also unforeseen events, for example because Hochdorf did not pass on the specifications or concepts carefully enough. "We went through a few loops here and there," he says. However, this application has also been productive since August 2015. "Today, we have a platform for future information and collaboration management requirements," says Stiep. Currently, audit management is being implemented, followed by complaint and contract management. The intranet at Hochdorf is therefore not just an information pool. It is developing into an interactive information and collaboration platform for the entire company.