With 54 million customers making virtual and in-person visits to the 7,137 grocery stores that its brands operate in Europe, the United States, and Indonesia every week, Ahold Delhaize is a truly global operation. “We’re very committed to serving the customers who visit our brands and their supermarkets,” says Robin Albregt, Director of Global IT Solution Delivery at Ahold Delhaize. However, the global nature of the business means that serving those customers requires a connected workforce who can seamlessly collaborate no matter where they are. “With a highly diverse geographic footprint like we have, bringing people together to collaborate is really important to Ahold Delhaize,” says Mike Laurenti, Chief Information Officer at the Global Support Office of Ahold Delhaize. “One of the things that makes Ahold Delhaize special is our ability to understand best practices from one part of the company and share them broadly across the organization. Microsoft Teams is an important tool for how we do that.” Supporting that collaboration is even more pressing as Ahold Delhaize and its brands continue to embrace hybrid work. “I’m focused on making sure we’re maximizing the productivity of this hybrid way of working,” says Albregt. “To do that, we’re deploying Teams and Teams Rooms systems across our global enterprise.”
“One of the things that makes Ahold Delhaize special is our ability to understand best practices from one part of the company and share them broadly across the organization. Microsoft Teams is an important tool for how we do that.”
Mike Laurenti, Chief Information Officer, Global Support Office, Ahold Delhaize
Serving customers and achieving big savings during extraordinary times
Ahold Delhaize and its brands began transitioning to Teams in mid-2019. The goal was to standardize on a single platform and streamline collaboration. In the past, they struggled with a hodgepodge of disparate collaboration tools. “It was a very scattered collaboration landscape,” says Albregt. Then came COVID-19, prompting Ahold Delhaize to fast-track adoption of Teams in response. “We needed to ensure that everyone was able to work from home, in addition to benefiting from a global, consistent platform,” says Albregt. The Ahold Delhaize team moved incredibly fast. “We provisioned 30,000 users in a weekend,” remembers Albregt. “Teams provided a platform where people could stay in touch, and we were still able to keep the supply chains running and serve customers in their time of need.”
Not only did the move help Ahold Delhaize and its brands realize a long-held ambition to standardize collaboration and respond to an extraordinary moment, but it was also cost-effective. “We save a substantial amount on technology costs annually by consolidating on Teams as our one collaboration solution. This allows us to reinvest to better serve our customers”, says Laurenti. Beyond the impressive cost savings, standardizing on Teams helped democratize collaboration across Ahold Delhaize. “In the recent past, our high-end collaboration technology was for the select few,” remembers Laurenti. “Now with Teams, if you are the senior-most executive or the junior-most individual contributor at the company, we all use the same collaboration tools.” According to Laurenti, part of the appeal of Teams was its scalability. “We’ve been able to really scale this technology and take advantage of the capabilities of one solution that satisfies all of our use cases,” he says. The move to Teams as a single, globally relevant collaboration hub is part of a wider move toward improved knowledge sharing at Ahold Delhaize—for example, the organization also adopted GitHub to replace a variety of tools that its 4,000 in-house developers use.
“We save a substantial amount on technology costs annually by consolidating on Teams as our one collaboration solution. This allows us to reinvest to better serve our customers.”
Mike Laurenti, Chief Information Officer, Global Support Office, Ahold Delhaize
Preparing for the future of work with Teams Rooms systems
After employees started using Teams to be productive from anywhere, the next step was to standardize meeting rooms across the organization in preparation for an eventual return to the office. “I expect that hybrid work will remain, and so will the demand for seamless connections between office and home locations,” says Albregt. In the past, team members often struggled to connect in virtual meetings. “We often spent the first five minutes of a meeting making sure everyone was connected rather than having productive conversations,” says Laurenti. “We gravitated to Teams to help improve how people communicated across the business.” Today, 160 Teams Rooms are available at campuses around the globe, and more are on the way. “We expect to add 80 more rooms in the next year,” says Albregt. Adds Laurenti, “When employees return to offices, they expect meeting spaces to be Teams Rooms where they can easily collaborate between online and in-person participants—they want the large screens for a more immersive experience.”
When envisioning an ideal Teams Rooms environment, consistency was key. “One major measurement for success is a consistent user experience,” Albregt explains. “We spent quite a bit of time designing different room types, but regardless of what room type a person is in or what country they join from, they’ll encounter standard equipment and a familiar experience.”
Ultimately, Ahold Delhaize created several room types to cater to various needs, from small two-person booths for spontaneous meetings to large rooms for more formal meetings. Regardless of the room size, each Teams Room uses Logitech equipment, including the Logitech Rally Plus video conferencing system and the Logitech MeetUp camera for smaller rooms. “The feedback has been extremely positive,” says Albregt. “In particular, people love the intuitiveness of the Teams user interface on the in-room consoles and the exceptional audio and video quality of the rooms.”
After focusing on the most common room types, Albregt and his team turned to what they call “specialty rooms”—for example, large auditoriums for all-hands meetings or training rooms. “One of the room types that I’m really impressed with is the immersive rooms that we’ve now converted into Teams Rooms,” says Albregt. “We now have two large screens in the rooms and very professional-looking backgrounds that are perfect for executive announcements and investor-relations road shows.”
“One of the room types that I’m really impressed with is the immersive rooms that we’ve now converted into Teams Rooms. We now have two large screens in the rooms and very professional-looking backgrounds that are perfect for executive announcements.”
Robin Albregt, Director of Global IT Solution Delivery, Ahold Delhaize
Premium support for an easily managed environment
According to Albregt, maintaining a consistent user experience across Teams Rooms includes making sure the technology is always running smoothly. “From an IT perspective, we were always keen to make sure that the service is stable, secure, and high performing,” he says. To deliver on that vision, Albregt and his team created a support model for Teams Rooms across the global enterprise. “As part of the technical design that preceded the implementation of Teams Rooms, we designed a support model that includes the Teams Rooms managed service,” says Albregt. The service was well suited for an organization like Ahold Delhaize, with a global reach and an ambitious timeline for deployment. “The Teams Rooms managed service gives us near real-time insights and looks at performance and utilization,” says Albregt. “The service helps us manage all the Teams Rooms globally in a seamless way. Additionally, Power BI reports have been built to provide further in-depth monitoring capabilities on network performance, utilization, and user experience.”
Supporting employees with flexible, leading-edge tools to improve work-life balance
For Ahold Delhaize and its brands, Teams and Teams Rooms systems have helped maintain its culture and productivity in an extraordinary time. “Using Teams and now Teams Rooms to continue serving our customers was very powerful for us,” says Albregt. The new tools have also helped Ahold Delhaize support its most valuable asset—its people. “Looking forward, I’m excited about Microsoft Viva Insights capabilities to provide analytics to help improve ways of working within the organization,” says Albregt. Viva Insights has already uncovered promising productivity data at Ahold Delhaize. “We clearly see that productivity is higher than it was prior to the widespread use of Teams among knowledge workers,” says Laurenti.
Even today, employees enjoy using Teams to help create a more sustainable work-life balance, making Ahold Delhaize and its brands great places to work. “Every organization wants to attract and retain the best talent,” says Albregt. “Providing a flexible working environment benefits that goal.” Laurenti agrees that Teams will ultimately help Ahold Delhaize and its brands compete in a race for talent. “With remote work, we’re finding ways to work more productively and draw more talent from places we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to tap into,” he says.
Now that Ahold Delhaize is well versed in Teams and Teams Room systems in the corporate environment, the next step is extending Teams capabilities to brand retail employees in supermarkets around the world. “We’ve already enabled Teams for frontline workers in some countries, and we’re on the path to making Teams available to everyone,” says Albregt. “We see Teams as a great tool for retail employees to communicate among themselves, share schedules, exchange shifts, and share knowledge between corporate offices and shop floors. We hope to achieve the same success we’ve already seen on the corporate side.”
“We see Teams as a great tool for retail employees to communicate among themselves, share schedules, exchange shifts, and share knowledge between corporate offices and shop floors.”
Robin Albregt, Director of Global IT Solution Delivery, Ahold Delhaize
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