Orkla uses Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels to drive business forward by tapping into outside experts and collaborating across their 300 brands and 90 business units

Using shared channels to move projects forward, faster

Hans Kaspar, a Switzerland-based business unit within Orkla, produces confectionary ingredients and uses shared channels in Teams to collaborate across borders. Says Peter Horlacher, Head of Finance, IT, and HR at Hans Kaspar, “We have a major project underway at the moment. We’re buying a new extruder that we’ll use to increase capacity in our plant to three times what it was before.”

To help make the project run smoothly, Hans Kaspar engaged an outside consultant—a professional based more than two hours away by air in Sweden. “The consultant is not part of our company, but through shared channels in Teams, we’ve added him to our channel so that he has access to all our documents and vice versa,” explains Horlacher. Prior to Teams and shared channels, that collaboration would have looked very different. “In the past, consultants would visit once a month because it made sense to have meetings onsite at the plant,” he continues. “But with Teams, they’re essentially always onsite. We collaborate on documents in the channel and even use Teams video meetings to show guests around the building if we need to. It’s a much more efficient solution.”

More efficient, and more sustainable. “Traveling by plane, you lose time and use up a lot of expenses and resources,” says Horlacher, who identifies the ability to reduce travel as a key benefit of using Teams and shared channels. Sustainability is a big part of both Hans Kaspar’s and Orkla’s corporate visions and a personal concern for Horlacher and his colleagues. “Whenever you plan to fly, you have to ask yourself, ‘Is it necessary?’” he says. “We minimize travel and work more flexibly and sustainably now that we use Teams Connect shared channels.”

Collaboration is essential to innovating new, more sustainable products, too. “Creating more sustainable products involves a lot of effort and interdepartmental collaboration,” says Aurtande. For example, when Orkla launched a toothbrush line with interchangeable heads, the project required input from marketing researchers, product developers, raw material suppliers, and production sites. “Teams and the shared channels feature are important tools we use to stay ahead of the competition and respond to consumer demands in a more agile way.”

Staying aligned with colleagues in organized collaboration spaces

In her role as a Quality Compliance Manager, Slintáková uses shared channels to address issues at any of the 11 production sites under her purview. “We have many, many factories,” she explains. “If an urgent issue comes up, it’s usually specific to that site, so I need to make sure only the relevant people see details and documents. For that, I’ve found shared channels to be the best.” Keeping only relevant parties involved helps Slintáková and her colleagues organize their work more effectively, too. She continues, “Using shared channels makes things more straightforward because people see only the teams and channels they belong to, which are relevant to them.”

Horlacher also uses shared channels to stay organized. “Before we started to work with Teams and shared channels, documents would be emailed around,” he says. “With Teams, there’s only one version of a document. Everybody can work on it, and you can even trace the history of who worked on what. This creates efficiency that saves us time and money.”

For his part, Aurtande uses shared channels to coordinate migration planning. “Email is good, but email for migration planning does not work,” he says. He and his colleagues use shared channels to gather IT contacts and stakeholders together in one place to plan migrations. “We also ask new acquisitions to add us to their allowlists through B2B direct connect, and then we create a shared channel with the onboarding team,” says Aurtande, referring to the B2B direct connect set of features for Azure Active Directory, which makes it possible for two external organizations to work together seamlessly. “It keeps each migration separate and makes it much easier to converse with new acquisitions,” he adds.

Continuing to improve collaboration with new features

When Aurtande joined Orkla, he immediately noted the transition underway toward using Teams for collaboration. “When I first started at Orkla, we had 2,100 active Teams users,” he recalls. “Now, more than 11,000 people use Teams, and there are over 7,000 active teams.”

Embracing Teams coincided with a new strategy for collaboration, one that prioritized working more efficiently. “Previously, people would check documents in and out of a cloud-based file repository, which hampered collaboration,” Aurtande continues. “Today, we use Teams to work simultaneously on documents and increase efficiency.” Shared channels have emerged as a valuable iteration of Orkla’s ongoing drive to work more effectively across its diverse businesses. “Shared channels have taken on a life of their own at Orkla,” he concludes. “Employees and outside collaborators could see right away how shared channels can make their lives easier.”

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