Client Story

Fonterra

New Zealand / Other

Fonterra found a true partner with Vecos

Fonterra’s vision was to bring several Auckland offices into one purpose built building embarking on a new way of working under the banner ‘One Fonterra’. They adopted an activity based working model designed around the principles developed by Veldhoen + Company to help deliver on the One Fonterra aspirations for their workplace. Their aim was to design the concept for a high-trust, high-performance and values-focused way of working and physical workplace. To achieve this, it was important for Fonterra to have a partner rather than a supplier.

Fonterra wanted to create settings which allowed users to work in different spaces for different activities. These were broken down into focus, process, duo work, chat, and collaboration areas, with a strong focus on technology to support this.

Something different about Fonterra’s ABW implementation was that the technology stream oversaw some of the deliverables that might traditionally be found in a facilities stream, including the office’s building management system and access control security system.

As part of the project, Fonterra shifted to a single global ID card system. In the past, the company had problems with people moving from site to site due to a variety of security systems. “People had a stack of ID cards,” Mike Saint,  who was the technology stream lead on the company’s ‘Ways of Working Project’, explains. “We’ve moved now to a single system: A single Fonterra passport which is integrated into an SAP system. When a person gets on-boarded in SAP, they automatically get provisioned into all of the IT systems they need as well as all the security systems. “It means their access card can be enabled or disabled automatically without having manual intervention — that’s been a really big win for us.”

“That single Fonterra ID card not only gives us access to buildings, it also gives us follow-me printing on our printers, it gives us access to lockers, gives us our staff discount in the cafeteria — there’s a whole bunch of things we can use that ID card for now,” Saint says.

Fonterra has been surveying employees since they moved to the new office. “We’ve got a 98 per cent satisfaction rating from our employees that have moved,” Saint says. “So 98 per cent of them said they would not go back to a non-activity-based working environment given the choice. That’s really a resounding success and we’ve had great feedback from people about systems and processes and the environment that we’ve created for them here. Because it is beautiful — it’s a fantastic environment and people really, really enjoy it.”

“The big levers with moving to an activity-based working environment are around collaboration and mobility. “The key things we had to deliver were a technical environment that allowed people to be mobile and that allowed them to collaborate effectively regardless of place and time.”
Mike Sainz
Head of Virtual Stream | Fonterra Ways of Working Project

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