The role of STRATWs One and Siteware in Strauss Coffee’s Continuous Improvement
Continuous Improvement is a practice that companies adopt when they continuously seek to improve their products, services, and processes. The financial benefits and time savings lie in the costs avoided, without losing the quality of the product or service offered to the customer.
See some numbers from this partnership and the use of STRATWs One:
5 years
of partnership
900
active users in 2021
17.708
indicators monitored in 2021
“We are a company in what is called the fast-moving consumer goods sector. This market is one where you need to be very efficient and coordinated. And part of our strategy is a continuous performance improvement program to ensure that all parts of the business are aligned,” analyzed Hilel Kremer, CFO of Strauss.
“It is an industry where you cannot stand still, you need to improve all the time. And that is why we decided to place excellent performance as part of the company’s strategy. And to do this, you don’t just need to talk, you need to take actions to implement the program, and Siteware’s platform allowed us to implement this program, so far very successfully,” he added.
If in the past reports with the results were obtained only at the end of the month, generating a late reaction to any deviation, with the use of Siteware’s tool the routine has changed.
“In the past, I or the managers would get the reports near the end of the month about what had happened in the previous months and then we would start asking ourselves why something went wrong and then draw up an action item or a project to solve it,” highlighted Hilel Kremer.
Now people are identifying problems as they appear and are not waiting until they get a report to start solving them.
“Today, things are being done proactively, since each of our users has their own small portal, where they log in and see the KPIs, and this can happen just two or three days after the end of the month and we already have people proactively working to solve the problem. The holistic approach of the solution is what really fits the business excellence method we are trying to implement,” celebrated the manager.
“I no longer discuss the results, I am already discussing the action item, the root cause, and that is proactivity.”
Use of the tool by managers
1733
meetings scheduled in Stratws in 2021
752
individual performance dashboards monitored in 2021
240
scorecards created in 2021
See now, in the words of the CFO, the other ways in which STRATWs One and Siteware impact the management routine at Strauss Coffee.
STRATWs One allows all sectors to monitor in a single place the organization’s key information, making managers’ decision-making more assertive and based on reliable data.
And for Hilel Kremer, this is one of the main advantages of Siteware’s tool.
“First of all, transparency and alignment between the different departments and the connection of the various management levels — what we call three or four levels below the CEO — understanding how they contribute to the overall vision and also the ability to quickly identify problems,” he evaluated.
“Their understanding of what went wrong and putting together tasks or projects to solve them is the main value we’ve seen so far,” he added.
There is no other tool like STRATWs One
Here at Siteware, we are proud to offer a unique and robust tool, with everything you need to fully manage your company’s corporate performance. There is no software on the market like STRATWs One. And it’s not just us saying that.
“After thoroughly examining another platform, we didn’t find any other that had all the ingredients in one place,” highlighted the CFO.
“Yes, there are some platforms that have KPIs, some that have project management, some where you can schedule meetings and have tasks. But the platform that has everything together and allows us to create what we call an operational social network within the company, the only software we found was STRATWs,” he added.
The choice of STRATWs was really due to Strauss’s need to make a radical change in the way strategy was executed.
Adoption of STRATWs One
114
problem-solving actions carried out in 2021
868
business units managing through STRATWs
1388
tasks created in 2021
The adoption of a new system usually does not come without some resistance from users. It is a change not only in routine but also in the company’s culture, as highlighted by Hilel Kremer.
However, with Siteware’s tool, the process was much smoother for Strauss.
“Implementing a program is also a cultural change. I hadn’t talked about that until now, but to make a cultural change is very difficult, and one of the advantages of Siteware’s system was that, because of the way things are visually presented, it is relatively easier to implement this change,” he evaluated.
“I must say that Siteware has very good components that helped with data collection, transferring from the ERP system and some HR data and other systems. And people understand the value of the platform and manage their routines,” added the CFO.
The implementation
“The rollout was done in phases; we started country by country. Specifically for us, each business unit (BU) is very different, so we didn’t want to take all the BUs together, but rather one by one and show that things were running at high speed, and then we moved on to another BU,” explained Hilel Kremer.
“We started with Poland, the first rollout was in September 2017. The flexibility for us was great, it was like a ready-to-use product, but we also felt that we could work with Siteware to meet our needs and improve over time,” he continued.
“I felt all along that we were doing this for a marathon and not for a sprint,” concluded the CFO.
A global tool
STRATWs One is now available in 13 languages and is used worldwide. One of the drivers behind the spread of the tool around the globe is Strauss Coffee, which, as we mentioned at the beginning of this article, operates in more than 10 countries.
“It was very good that we used the bilingual platform, and that made the barrier smaller and the door larger for people to enter the platform. People are very engaged; it is part of the daily routine for some, and in some places it is a monthly routine,” he celebrated.
“We see that Siteware is helping the business units align between the different departments, so we see better communication among them, especially in countries where people are not sitting in the same place,” he went on.
“Now we can better assess the countries, and that’s why we also have what we call multifunctional; so the country will have its own set of KPIs, but our COO, for example, will have his set of metrics that is unique and unified across different countries. And he can easily compare between countries, run his monthly performance core in the same way across different countries, along with several other benefits we have noticed,” he concluded.