Circle iconCircle icon

Changing change from within

SUCCESS STORY

Sector: Agrochemicals/Biotech

Syngenta is a global organisation using science, technology and research to transform how crops are grown.

Its business goal was to transform itself – effectively and sustainably – so that it could better deliver its products to farmers in different sized markets.

Virtual Change Management Certification

The need to transform the organisation - effectively and sustainably

In less than 30 years, around 2 billion more people will need to be fed and Syngenta is committed to improving global food security in a sustainable way. Helping growers around the world safely and efficiently produce more food without using more resources.

Our engagement with Syngenta started around 2014, at which time a variety of factors including increasing temperatures and decreasing crop yields, led to a slowdown in the global agriculture sector. The company’s leadership realised that overcoming these challenges required a significant evolution in business practices which was to be achieved by a comprehensive transformation programme - underpinned by key digital alliances.

Syngenta’s business goal was to transform itself – effectively and sustainably – so that it could better deliver its products to farmers in different sized markets. The solution to get them there was an ambitious initiative called AOL (which stood for Accelerating Operational Leverage) aimed to:

  • optimise the cost structure across all enterprise functions

  • included introducing a digitally enabled sales and marketing process using Salesforce functionality. For Syngenta this was an unprecedented change, but with substantial benefits.

Commercial teams can now engage customers with a 360° view of their needs and work with them on how to make their farms more sustainable – all while pushing agribusiness into a more digitally driven, decision-making environment.

Jorge Lopez

AOL Programme Director, Syngenta

Virtual Change Management Certification

The transformational challenge

Major Organisational Change was not unfamiliar to Syngenta and over the years they had been building expertise and capability in Change Implementation among the L&OD community - which had created individual experts in several functions. In addition, an AOL blueprint to help simplify future global project rollouts was put in place – which was to be led by a new Operational Excellence (OpEx) group.

However, with the sheer magnitude of Change – which was enterprise-wide across 25 countries, affecting multiple businesses, processes and technologies (and also shaping ambitions, strategy, culture and brand for 27,000 people – Syngenta knew that:

  • they would need to significantly expand the number of internal change experts and further institutionalise Change Management excellence across the organisation

  • success would require a shift in mindset and ways of working from “experts doing change” to “everyone in projects doing change, supported by experts

  • change was affecting everyone and people in different roles needed easy access to skills, tools and know-how to be effective

Virtual Change Management Certification

The need for proven expertise in building global Organisational capability

Time was of the essence and Syngenta wanted to find a partner with expertise and credentials for:

  • helping global organisations build and scale internal change capability

  • methodology development, integration and deployment

  • providing practical toolkits and accessible learning across a distributed network

Changefirst was selected as Syngenta’s Change Management partner and delivered a solution that involved a 4-stage approach that included:

Results

This 4-phase approach has delivered a number of key benefits for Syngenta including:

  • Created active executive sponsorship across key workstreams

  • Developed a culture of data-driven decision making around the people side of Change

  • provided cost-effective access to a consistent, scalable methodology for 15% of Syngenta’s global population

  • drove a reduction of 40% in change capability building costs over a 3-year period.

  • established a company-specific benchmarking database to help validate key Change decisions

...
...
...

Virtual Change Management Certification

Download a copy

Interested to learn more?

You can download your own copy of this success story here. And learn how we were able to enable them to deliver change in a more productive and sustainable way.

Download success story

If you are facing similar challenges around change and transformation then feel free to contact us for a no-obligation discussion.

We help organisations across a range of industry sectors to develop the capability to deliver change more effectively through people.

Extensive experience across sectors

Here are just a few of our success stories from other sectors