The People-Ready Business
/ Energizer HoldingsEnergizer Workers Empowered to Energize the Business from the Ground Up
Story at a Glance
Evolving consumer trends, a more demanding retail environment, and intense global competition have forced Energizer, one ofthe world’s largest producer of batteries, to rethink the way it does business. The company has replaced its command-and-control management structure with an empowered, collaborative, grass-roots–driven business model that aims to give employees easy access to information and to one another, with the goal of quickly delivering business value where it’s needed—in the trenches of daily decision making.
Energizer has standardized on Microsoft® software to help employees communicate faster, pool ideas, react sooner, and eliminate wasted time and effort. Energizer’s philosophy is to empower every employee with all the technology it can give them, to help them be as productive as possible. Multiplied by 7,800, even small efficiencies add up to tremendous companywide gains. Also, by tapping into the intelligence of smart employees all over the world, Energizer can generate better ideas in less time, which helps it stay ahead of customer demands and competitive threats.
Randy Benz is out to start a revolution—or rather, thousands of mini revolutions. The Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Energizer Holdings had an epiphany about how he could use the software on 7,800 knowledge workers’ desks to kick-start productivity one business task at a time and snowball this productivity into significant competitive advantage. Energizer shifted its paradigm about when and why it should upgrade desktop software when it realized that employees could be incredible agents for change and innovation when given the right tools. Today, Energizer keeps employees equipped with the latest and greatest desktop software, to drive business responsiveness and change at the grass-roots level.
Keeping Up with Business Acceleration
Since 1896, Energizer has been going strong, like its Energizer Bunny, successfully meeting and surmounting every challenge that global markets, fickle consumers, and demanding retail partners could throw at it. However, the need to adapt, react, and respond to change just never stops; in fact, with Energizer’s business pushing into 165 countries, the challenges just seem to come faster.
“Everything in our business is driving us to be more nimble,” Benz says. “Consumer tastes change more frequently; they expect more innovation in products, packaging, and merchandising. We have to innovate more frequently to hold their attention. Retailers, too, expect us to do more to help them succeed—to bring new ideas to market faster and get product on their shelves sooner.” Of course, globalization has meant that Energizer has even more competitors trying to do the same things.
All these market drivers have caused Energizer’s overall business pace to accelerate, which requires that workers become increasingly collaborative. Energizer’s old command-and-control management structure inhibited the flow of information to the people who needed to make informed decisions on the front lines. Manual business processes and outdated software were barriers to employees connecting and communicating in a flash. And locating needed information in an organization as big as Energizer chewed up valuable time and caused a lot of redundant work.
Vision: Anywhere to Anything
In 2004, Benz came up with a grand vision for increasing employee speed and effectiveness. He called it A2A—anywhere to anything. His idea was that any employee should be able to access any information, stored in any application, from any other application, using any device, at any time. “We wanted to take all of our information off of shared drives and put it in one place where it was searchable, shareable, and accessible from anywhere,” Benz says.
The first thing Benz and his team did was to deploy a new information-sharing platform based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Once the intranet portal was launched, employees began creating hundreds of collaboration sites where they share documents and discussion boards and manage a variety of everyday business processes. Alerts let team members know when something new is added to a site, and built-in workflows automate common activities such as document review and approval, issue tracking, and signature collection. “If our people can collaborate better, it gives them a huge advantage in working with internal colleagues, partners, and customers,” Benz says.
Software Paradigm Shift
Once energized by collaboration sites and easier information sharing, Energizer employees wanted even more—and so did Benz. “When I saw how collaboration sites caught fire, I realized that we could be doing so much more to boost the productivity and innovation of our knowledge workers by giving them better software tools,” he says. Until then, Energizer had lethargically updated its Microsoft Office productivity programs, only to keep software updates and support in place. However, those upgrades had been so time-consuming that employees’ desktop experience lagged the state of the art by three to five years.
“We had a huge investment in these products, but we weren’t using them as we could have,” Benz says. “We realized that we needed to stay ahead of the curve to keep productivity and innovation up. Our whole paradigm shifted. We suddenly wanted to do everything we could to keep the latest software on everyone’s desks. We saw that we needed to empower every employee with everything we had.”
Tools Everyone Should Have
Benz looked around and realized that all 7,800 knowledge workers already used Microsoft Office productivity software every day. He also saw that Microsoft had a wide range of collaboration tools that complemented its productivity software and worked across multiple devices. So Energizer standardized on Microsoft software across the board. Every new capability that Benz brings in has the same familiar interface, so there’s practically no learning curve or resistance to adoption. And there is very little work for IT staff, because all of the new applications work together out of the box.
Energizer “bet the farm,” says Benz, on an end-to-end Microsoft solution that he believes is uniquely suited to meet the needs of an empowered organization. “To be accepted and successful, software has to be familiar and easy to use,” says John Tschannen, Director of End User Services at Energizer. “Once people are familiar with the Microsoft word processing, spreadsheet, and e-mail programs, they’re immediately familiar with the Microsoft collaboration, presence, video conferencing, and instant messaging programs.”
Tschannen says that the Microsoft pricing model also supports broad-based user empowerment. “Microsoft recognizes that these tools are capabilities that everyone in an organization should have,” he says. “License fees for many other collaboration and performance management solutions make them elitist tools. We want to deploy thousands, not dozens or hundreds, of copies, and the Microsoft pricing model scales easily.”
In addition to taking a “we’ll have one of everything” approach to desktop software, Energizer has moved to accessing its software through Microsoft Online Services, which speeds the deployment of new applications and minimizes IT costs. Within a couple of months of a product’s release, all 7,800 knowledge workers have the latest productivity-boosting software on their desks.
Thousands of Mini Revolutions
Energizer has used its new software arsenal to boost productivity, speed communications, and automate processes one individual and business task at a time, depending on the multiplication effect to do the rest. “No single tool has revolutionized the company,” Benz says. “Rather, we’ve had thousands of mini revolutions across our workforce that have cumulatively yielded an enormous impact. It’s the antithesis of a mammoth SAP implementation, which is all about centralized change. This is about local change multiplied 6,000 times.”
For example, Tschannen headed up the effort to upgrade all of Energizer’s desktop computers to Microsoft Office Professional 2007 to take advantage of new ease-of-use features that boost productivity. Additionally, employees can use these newer programs to access line-of-business (LOB) applications from within the familiar Microsoft Office system. For example, employees can export data from LOB applications into spreadsheets, and then access those spreadsheets through the collaboration sites. Any time the LOB data is updated, the information is automatically updated in the spreadsheets.
Other examples: Carol Knotts, Senior Account Manager at Energizer, drove the use of electronic forms to speed business processes from procurement to shipping. Instead of routing paper forms from person to person for completion and approval, Energizer puts electronic forms on a SharePoint site where members of multiple teams can view and track them simultaneously.
Buff Buffkin, Director of Human Resources at Energizer, implemented the use of the Microsoft desktop Web and audio conference service so that employees all over the world can participate in quarterly town hall–style meetings in which management shares earnings, updates, and direction for the upcoming quarter. Previously, these meetings were limited to just a few U.S. sites that had the appropriate videoconferencing equipment; now, everyone can participate.
Krista Ogle, Director of Internal Audit at Energizer, encouraged company auditors to use presence, instant messaging, and collaboration software to instantly communicate with colleagues from remote locations, post findings to collaboration sites, and reduce the travel time and cost of audits. Audit managers at headquarters can keep abreast of audit progress almost in real time, rather than waiting for end-of-day reports.
By replacing its command-and-control management style with one that provides both information and analytical tools to hundreds of “difference-makers” on the front lines, Energizer has seen significant improvements in business planning and forecasting. “Over the last five years, our stock price has skyrocketed and we’ve been able to make two major acquisitions: Schick Wilkinson Sword and Playtex Products,” Benz says. “People have made this happen. We’re building a culture of empowerment in which people make decisions, and creative ideas surface from the bottom up. Every day, people come to work knowing that they can make a difference to the business. That changes the culture in a very profound way.”
Seven Thousand Heads Are Better Than One
By empowering every employee with “everything we have,” Energizer is boosting each individual’s productivity by a few minutes to an hour per day—and multiplying those gains by 7,800. Perhaps more importantly, Energizer is bringing the intelligence and ideas of talented employees all over the world to bear on market challenges. “Having people put their ideas together to solve a problem is better than trying to solve it individually,” Tschannen says. “We’ve made it easy for employees to find one another and the information they need, work together efficiently, communicate results convincingly, and move quickly once decisions are made.”
Today, Energizer is better able to embrace what’s coming and keep its business ahead of the curve by using familiar, trusted software that empowers employees in everything they do. “Microsoft software helps keep us nimble,” Benz says. “We don’t know what the future holds, but we know the challenges will be tough because they always have been. We think we’re in good shape, because we’ve given the best possible capabilities to the largest number of users so that everyone can contribute effectively.”
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