Nestlé delivers digital adoption and transformation at scale for 270K+ team members across 200 apps

Nestlé is the world’s largest food and beverage company, with over 2,000 brands and 270,000 global employees. Nestlé’s digital transformation was challenged by common gaps faced by many companies – low adoption rates, inefficient use of critical apps, growing user fatigue, and the complexities of multiple systems. Since team members are spread around the world, Nestlé’s IT team required effective ways to engage with their end users and provide the right level of support in their moment of need.

In just three short years, Nestlé has accelerated its Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) journey, including winning the 2022 Realizer Award for Operational Excellence and 2023 Realizer Award for Best Employee Experience. They are delivering digital adoption at scale and tapping into WalkMe analytics to continuously improve employees’ experience and deliver business results. They started their WalkMe journey with SuccessFactors, which is used by everyone in the organization, and quickly expanded WalkMe to ServiceNow, Concur, Power BI, SAP Ariba, and many more systems (over 140 in total).

How has Nestlé managed to accomplish so much in just two years? Nestlé’s commitment to increasing the digital dexterity of their workforce started back in 2016, with the creation of a Center of Excellence focused on employee enablement services, better known as the Digital Adoption Center (DAC). The DAC team is a group of full-time dedicated resources with diverse capabilities that deliver Digital Adoption Solutions. One of the pillars of the DAP strategy at Nestlé is the creation of a DAP Community of Practice (CoP), which includes almost 300 DAP Builders, all with a common mission: to improve the day-to-day life of their employees.

Nestlé initially introduced WalkMe to assist with a major change management project: shifting from an older SAP HR system to SAP SuccessFactors, a system that was business-critical and impacted thousands of people. The most impacted group of users were Line Managers. In the past, administrators were responsible for completing many of the hiring and onboarding tasks. With the introduction of SuccessFactors, those tasks shifted to the Line Managers, bringing new terminology and complex business processes.

After a few roll outs, it became apparent that traditional learning methods were not sufficient. With only six weeks until the next implementation, the ITHR Implementation team asked the Digital Adoption Center for help to improve the onboarding experience, simplify workflows, and make it easier for people to complete digital tasks.

In just six weeks, the Digital Adoption Center team learned the basics of WalkMe. With the help of the HR team, they mapped 15 key business processes, set up the WalkMe Editor, and developed solutions – just in time for the next implementation. The next rollout of SuccessFactors was a resounding success. Task completion rates went up by 200% and SAP SuccessFactors’ internal NPS scores increased by 40 points. WalkMe became an integral part of the SuccessFactors change management strategy. One of the unplanned benefits of this first initiative was that the Nestlé team won the 2021 Constellation Research Supernova Future of Work Award.

With this mindset, the Digital Adoption Center team continued to expand to different modules of SuccessFactors throughout 2020. They also became avid users of WalkMe Insights to analyze user journeys, gain transparency, set goals, and create a KPI Framework for their digital adoption projects. By adopting a data-first operating model, it became easier to measure the value WalkMe was bringing to the organization.

With the success of SuccessFactors, other IT Product Managers became interested in using WalkMe. After several awareness sessions and solution demos, over 30 IT Product Managers signed on for 2021 projects. This helped to create the business case for an enterprise-wide license and the expansion of WalkMe across the IT tech stack.

“Since we’ve had digital adoption with WalkMe, it has become easier for us as a tech organization to be nimble and quick and react to application and process changes in a way that helps the business and also has a strong focus on the user,” says Patrick Fueldner, IT Product Manager, Digital Adoption at Nestlé.

As a result of their efforts, the DAP Program has seen:

• $30M+ inferred financial productivity gains over a rolling 12-month period
• 1.5M+ productivity hours returned to the business

Additionally, WalkMe Insights analytics and testimony from IT Product Managers are delivering very encouraging results for specific applications and processes, including:

• 50% reduction in training needs
• 250%+ increases in task completion rates for business-critical apps
• 93% decrease in support calls

An example of how Nestlé expanded WalkMe beyond SuccessFactors is with the end-to-end HR process for hiring and onboarding new team members. This is a big, complex business process made up of 16 systems and many workflows. These workflows, historically, have been difficult to measure and improve.

Nestlé uses WalkMe to measure the adoption of the business process, streamline the process with automated steps, increase “first time-right” entries with data validation, and deliver a great user experience, complete with Smart WalkThrus and SmartTips along the way. There are even links to the HR knowledge base providing contextual knowledge articles.

The feedback from the new employees, as well as the people managing the process, has been outstanding. The automation has made the biggest impact because it simplifies workflows and gives precious time back to the employees. New employees are kept engaged with system notifications and can easily complete their onboarding task lists directly from WalkMe Workstation — and evidence of these improvements is the 70% drop in support tickets related to onboarding.

The team also uses WalkMe to drive safe AI adoption; for example, Nestle’s DAC team implemented digital adoption solutions for ChatGPT and Nestle’s internal compliant version (NestGPT) that prompted users to select if they were using the service for personal or business use. If users select personal, they’re reminded to not share any private information with a series of SmartTips and ShoutOuts. If users select “business,” they’re directed to Nestle’s private version, which also includes guidance for writing great prompts based on users’ roles, so employees get the most out of the technology.

Nestlé is now guiding users on about 50 applications with WalkMe, and the DAC team uses WalkMe’s Digital Experience Analytics on more than 150 systems to understand adoption and usage. In their most recent Value Assessment, they measured more than $30M in inferred financial productivity gains over a rolling 12-month period. This equates to over 1.5 million productivity hours given back to the organization.

Prior to using WalkMe for ServiceNow, the IT Service Management team was spending a lot of time answering support calls and emails – especially how-to questions about the system or the processes. After WalkMe, these support requests dropped by 93%, resulting in the team having much more time to be proactive to the needs of their users.

WalkMe Discovery and UI Intelligence are two additional capabilities that help Nestle deliver data-driven insights to the business. “With UI Intelligence, our application owners are able to see, on the field level, the interactions and problems that our employees face – and for us as an IT team, it’s completely configuration-less. Once it’s enabled, we get a heatmap of all of our forms, so we can work with application owners to analyze the data, understand friction points, and do something about it to improve employees’ experience,” Fueldner says.

WalkMe Discovery brings similar benefits, explains Fueldner, “WalkMe Discovery gives us a birds eye view of all of the applications that are being used in our IT environment. The business value of this is that you can understand application usage trends and identify Shadow IT and Shadow AI simply by looking at the dashboard.” The DAC team then works with Nestle’s Security & Compliance team to determine if any action is required, such as consolidating licenses or using DAP solutions to drive proper usage.

“AI in Nestle has been all of the buzz in Nestle this year, and we’re committed to adopting AI tools in a safe, ethical, and responsible way. WalkMe has been quite instrumental for our initiatives. There’s a surprising amount of Shadow AI applications and with WalkMe Discovery, we’re able to see what’s actually going on, what are people using, and what we want to do to improve the situation if we see a need. If there’s no need, WalkMe Discovery is then just confirming everything is fine and we’re doing the right things already,” says Fueldner.

The Digital Adoption Center has grown to include 8 direct reports who are all full-time team members. The WalkMe operations team consists of 6 members, who all are WalkMe certified. To augment their in-house team and keep up with the demand for WalkMe solutions, they’ve engaged Charlton House, a WalkMe Certified Partner and professional services consultancy focused on helping organizations deliver successful digital adoption strategies across industries.

Specifically, as a result of Charlton House’s work building WalkMe content for SAP Ariba, the Nestlé team has seen a big decrease in the turnaround time for contract signatures and an overall smoother experience for their Suppliers – as well as a 250% increase in user interactions in critical fields, which means users are now inputting accurate data, translating into a big reduction in downstream support tickets. Not only are team members completing the processes faster and more accurately, they’re also enjoying the tool more; Nestlé’s NPS scores for SAP Ariba have jumped 63% since Charlton House deployed WalkMe on the platform.

It is no surprise that Nestlé won the Innovative Company Operational Excellence category in WalkMe’s Realizer Awards in 2022 and the Innovative Company Employee Experience category in WalkMe’s Realizer Awards in 2023– and they didn’t stop there. To ensure long-term success of the program, the team has started to document their DAP Strategy and Program in Journey Maps and Playbooks. They are expecting to use these frameworks to scale their operations even further and faster in the future.