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CASE STUDY

Communardo empowers frontline workers with Teams and Power Platform

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About Communardo Communardo specializes in implementing digital transformation that enables agility and shapes modern working environments to be geared towards efficiency and faster execution. Recognized as a 2024 finalist in the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards, Modern Workplace for Frontline Workers category.

Highlighted solution Frontline Worker

Highlighted industry Retail

Headquarters Germany

Microsoft partner since 2001

Partner growth Doubled in size from 150 to 300 employees in the past five years

Innovative way of bringing Microsoft Cloud benefits to frontline workers

Communardo has provided comprehensive services around Microsoft 365 to customers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland for two decades, but in just the past five years the team has doubled in size from 150 to 300 employees. One of the practice areas driving this rapid growth is Frontline Worker solutions, particularly in the retail, manufacturing, and logistics industries. According to Paul Kruse, Head of Business Line, Internal Communications and Learning at Communardo, “Frontline Worker technologies are a sizeable portion of our business. We have very specific standalone implementations, but, really, almost every engagement incorporates certain frontline worker elements.”

As a Frontline Worker specialist, Communardo has developed best practices for ensuring successful deployments. This includes providing strategic guidance that focuses efforts on the most critical pain points, along with creating change-management protocols that help ensure widespread frontline adoption of the implemented technologies. “Giving them powerful tools like Teams and SharePoint is great. But success is not the rollout of the tool, it is the usage of the tool to make people better and happier in their work. That is why our focus on change management is so important,” said Dirk Wippern, Senior Consultant and Location Manager at Communardo.

Another differentiator is Microsoft Power Platform, which Communardo incorporates to provide customized, integrated functionality in nearly every Frontline Worker engagement. It can be very simple use cases, like creating a digital version of employee discount cards that workers can use on their phones, to the wholesale replacement of complex processes, such as taking a production-line quality-control check process spread across five different systems into a single Power App. “Power Platform makes it possible to really elevate the value of Frontline Worker solutions very quickly,” said Kruse. “This ability to offer customization that fits in with existing processes and daily operations is a big part of what convinces frontline workers to adopt the solution across the board.”

Major retailer improves communication and productivity with Teams

One of Communardo’s customers is a German hypermarket chain that over that past four decades has expanded to become a major retailer, with more than 1,500 stores in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. The company was relying on email to communicate with its frontline retail employees and had paper-based checklists for ensuring daily in-store tasks were completed. With the goal of improving collaboration and giving workers a better experience, the retailer reached out to Microsoft to modernize these processes. Microsoft kicked off a Microsoft Teams pilot to digitize communications in all the Slovakia stores, then engaged Communardo for its change-management expertise to ensure the solution was successfully aligned to frontline workers’ needs. “We used a champion approach, delivering workshops and tools to enable champions throughout the country who were experts in the existing processes. These champions then helped drive adoption in each of their stores, showing others how beneficial the new Teams app was in making their workday easier,” said Wippern.

The customer is planning to implement a “bring your own device” model with the appropriate security and access controls for thousands of employee devices connecting to the new Teams channels where store leadership can share company announcements, employee benefit details, store-related checklists, digital processes, or any other important information.

The three-month pilot was very successful, and Communardo is currently in the process of helping the champions roll out the solution in production, which is on schedule to be completed by the end of 2024. “This was a very standard implementation, but it just demonstrates how powerful the core features of Teams are to transform the work environment,” said Kruse. “Working with the champions, we were able to create a blueprint of how to approach implementation and adoption in all of the remaining countries.”

Future is bright for frontline worker enablement

Customers are increasingly approaching Communardo about Microsoft Copilot to see how leveraging generative AI can provide additional benefits around Microsoft 365. “With AI, we are already seeing that background processes like HR [human resources] make it faster for frontline workers to get the information they need for time off, shift scheduling, and those types of things. But I think that will evolve to ‘on the floor’ or ‘in the field’ assistance that frontline workers interact with directly,” said Wippern.

AI is becoming another key differentiator for Communardo around Frontline Worker solutions. “We have already decided as a team that we will inspire and encourage all our customers to implement solutions with AI, and Copilot is going to be the driving force behind that. We are building a Center of Excellence approach that we have used in the past with Power Platform to help customers better manage use cases, governance, security, and adoption,” continued Wippern.

Communardo sees frontline workers as an area of the business that needs the same level of powerful, intuitive tools as information workers. “Frontline workers should be considered as core to the IT strategy, and businesses should strive for digital parity with information workers. Provisioning information and technology solutions for frontliners is a natural part of every discussion we have with a client, and we think this only results in improving overall business prosperity,” concluded Kruse.

Frontline workers should be considered as core to the IT strategy, and businesses should strive for digital parity with information workers.

—Paul Kruse, Head of Business Line, Internal Communications and Learning at Communardo

We have already decided as a team that we will inspire and encourage all of our customers to implement solutions with AI, and Copilot is going to be the driving force behind that.

—Dirk Wippern, Senior Consultant and Location Manager at Communardo