Danone innovates organisational change with always-on approach to business transformation

Danone is a multinational food and beverage company that sells products in 120 countries around the world. After a series of large-scale organisational restructures, the company decided to innovate its business transformation methodology using a continuous organisation design approach.

This new approach renders costly, reactive, high-risk transformation projects obsolete and enables Danone to respond more quickly to market uncertainty and to improve its workforce planning process. Danone achieved this using organisational design and software platform, Orgvue.

Danone completed its last large transformation event in 2021, when the company restructured from being a category-led business to a country-led one. The intention was to restore the business to profitable growth by getting closer to the customer and regaining local control over its food sourcing operations.

This initiative provided the blueprint for Danone’s always-on approach to transformation that now sees the company moving work around people rather than people around work, removing its reliance on workforce reduction as a transformation tool.

Danone worked with Orgvue to completely redesign its organisational structure in just three months, which would otherwise have taken two to three times longer. Danone has since shortened its planning cycles from annual to quarterly and introduced continuous tracking of its workforce demand and supply.

“Danone has ended its event-based approach to business transformation,” says Vincent Favre, Global Organisational Development Director at Danone. “We believe that by instead taking an ‘always-on’ approach, we can minimise disruption to the business, better react to changing organisational demands and, most importantly, better support our workforce.”