The Danone success story: How Danone harmonized its benefits offering across multiple locations
Danone has around 100,000 employees worldwide and its brands can be found in more than 120 markets.
In Germany alone, the food company distributes four product categories
and employs experts at various locations.
This led to several benefits catalogs and systems for the German workforce, which were neither uniform nor transparent in the end. In 2022, Hartwig Frey and his team began searching for a flexible solution to standardize and centralize employee benefits at Danone Germany.
“At the end of 2022, Danone planned to merge its four German companies. It was clear then that we would also lead the employees as a unit. For this, we needed a portal where we could bring together all benefits. We wanted to create transparency to, for example, provide clear, structured information to executives for their teams.”
Hartwig Frey, HR Compensation & Benefits Manager, Danone
The challenge
Until 2022, the company in Germany consisted of four separate companies, each managing a product division of Danone.
Each of these companies had its own works
council, policies, and employee benefits.
This led to:
- Decentralized benefits regulations
- The use of different benefits tools
- Data silos and lack of transparency
- Different employee experiences
Due to the planned merger of the four companies, which formed the framework for the benefits project at Danone, there were only a few months left to implement a new solution.
The solution
Structured and flexible towards the goal
Due to the tight timeframe, the implementation
at Danone had to proceed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
The benefits were prioritized into work
packages and gradually processed. While some
packages were being tested by the HR team,
the development team moved on to the next
ones.
Thus, Benifex succeeded in implementing all
components by the time of Danone’s merger
in November 2022, ensuring that a successful
rollout was imminent.
“Benifex structured project management
helped us a lot in the temporal structuring of the
implementation. Many things ran in parallel, and
we made great progress in a short time.”
Hartwig Frey, HR Compensation & Benefits Manager, Danone.
Results
Together with the Benifex team, Danone achieved remarkable milestones in the
short implementation time:
- Analysis, clean-up, and alignment of benefits before platform integration
- Successful nationwide launch of the central platform in just six months
- Inclusion of all employees, including those without company email (for example, in production) via terminals and support from internal IT teams
“We divided our benefits into Core and Pick-&-Choose. Core benefits, such as company pension schemes or EAP, are automatically received by all employees from day one. Pick-&-Choose benefits, such as fitness, mobility, or catering, they choose themselves.”
Hartwig Frey, HR Compensation & Benefits Manager, Danone.
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