Haldex unifies company knowledge and strengthens communications
Sweden-based Haldex provides innovative brake solutions to the global commercial vehicle industry, with a focus on enhanced safety, environment and vehicle dynamics. With Omnia and Microsoft Office 365 tools, Haldex has unified company knowledge and strengthened communications.
In 1916 the first patent for an automatic brake adjuster for trains was filed. Today Haldex is a global market leader in several product categories, including brake adjusters for drum brakes, and operates sales, R&D, and manufacturing all over the world.
With employees ranging in specialty from designers and product developers to marketing and sales representatives, knowledge management and strong cross-departmental communication have become increasingly important.
– We aim to build a learning organization, says Patrik Bergman, Collaboration and Learning Manager at Haldex.
Today, Haldex sees their organization work together from any location, enhancing collaboration. From R&D to sales to IT, employees use Omnia to work together seamlessly and innovate globally across all time zones. When the teams in Sweden work with their counterparts in Asia and the rest of Europe, using Omnia, they eliminate the barriers to working together, sharing knowledge, and will help drive product development and align their business strategies.
– The reason for Haldex to begin the discussion about a new Intranet was because our old Intranet did not meet the quality department’s demands on how the governing documents were handled. We also did not have a quality management system that was global and worked for everyone. The deficiencies were so severe that people could not find the documents they needed on time and it is essential in internal and external audits of a security company like us, says Patrik Bergman. It simply made the employees unable to work effectively anymore.
So Haldex sat down and tried to do their homework. They started with pinpointing not what they had, but what tools they needed that would help employees work together better and more efficiently.
After the homework was done, Haldex went out to the market and made a procurement based on them.
– It quickly became apparent that few products have such a substantial focus as Omnia has on working with governing documents and a document management system linked to a quality management system, says Patrik Bergman. – It seems that many suppliers are content with what SharePoint can deliver right out of the box, then perhaps tweak it a bit, or they have created a quality management system that is not integrated enough with the various processes. That’s not the case with Omnia.
In mid-2019, Haldex switched from their existing solution to Omnia. Since the switch Haldex has already begun to see the effects of Omnia in the daily work, with more structured m. Now the employees find what they search for and can work efficiently in different collaborations. After doing an inventory of the existing documents before migration from the previous system, they were forced to redo the homework on the metadata management view.
– We quickly decided to put it as a stand-alone quality project, so it was nothing that stopped us. With the help of a custom-built interface, we can now easily pick up the governing documents and apply the right metadata or remove the obsolete documents, which of course was necessary for the migration.
Since implementing Microsoft 365, Haldex has made extensive use of the workspaces, and especially the document management has landed well with their R&D projects, which previously had to link different types of governing documents from various libraries to the different workspaces. Now Haldex has harnessed the capabilities of Omnia to create a consistent way to share and store information. Internally, Omnia has become the hub of company knowledge, housing patents, documentation, and essential certifications.
– Today we can embed all the necessary documents directly into the collaboration pages, says Patrik Bergman. – The way we’ve built the pages, there’s no one working in an RnD project who doesn’t know how to work or which tollgates apply, and this has opened people’s eyes. It has been very positive in many ways that we might not have anticipated.
Transitioning with ease
During the months following implementation and onboarding, the transition has continued to pay dividends. Employees have found the onboarding process brief and intuitive and benefited in ways they had not anticipated.
– For instance, today, when the employees get their new sites; they have a page with Teams included, and that’s been a wow-experience for many. “Can you have your documents here too?! Great!”
– The help we’ve received from Precio Fishbone has been perfect. It was never the case that Precio Fishbone promised us gold and green forests, and we then met a completely different reality. What we have seen is that they are very knowledgeable people and that they dare to say no when we have stupid proposals. That’s very important.
– Thanks to the strong support, the project was very quickly carried out together with the inventory.
As business at Haldex continues to grow, sales and marketing employees will find themselves working from a growing list of destinations and in different languages. With Omnia’s multi-language support the Haldex staff, have their lines of communication open and diverse, and their new horizons are bright.
