STEF: monday.com to drive progress across its subsidiaries

STEF specializes in temperature-controlled transport and logistics in Western Europe, with a strong presence in France. It serves several industries, including mass retail (GMS) and e-commerce. Facing rapid growth and the development of multiple subsidiaries, STEF’s GMS business unit tasked Sylvain Madeleni, Digital Transformation and Innovation Manager, with harmonizing how the group’s actions are steered and making project management more efficient. Here is a look back at this project carried out with Synolia x monday.com.

The digital transformation of STEF, Europe’s food supply chain leader

Producers, manufacturers, distributors, foodservice operators… The multi-specialist group meets every transport and storage need, whatever the product. It operates 283 platforms and warehouses across Europe and positions itself as the link between the agri-food and consumer worlds. Before the internal digital transformation project in the GMS business unit, the group’s subsidiaries managed their actions with Excel files, whiteboards, and email threads… But this way of working had its limits, since every subsidiary and every employee used their own method. And without reminders, action plans fell behind schedule.

To professionalize internal project management, the management of STEF’s GMS business unit decided to adopt a dedicated solution. A digital transformation project led by Sylvain Madeleni.

The STEF brief

Help subsidiaries move forward with a collaborative solution that harmonizes how every action and project run by the departments is steered.

Synolia x monday.com

After a market study and several trials, monday.com emerged as the ideal collaborative solution. The tool was chosen for its ease of use, its customization potential, and its ability to adapt to the specific needs of the 24 sites of STEF’s GMS business unit.

From the very first licenses, Synolia stepped in to help STEF’s GMS business unit build its boards. Synolia also delivered onboarding training for new users and hosted webinars.

Project steps: Consulting and requirements specification • Board and automation design • Deployment support • Training • License management

Fast rollout and adoption

With Synolia’s help, the project team took one month to build the foundation of the monday.com boards before rolling it out to all 24 sites of the business unit.

For the rollout and user adoption, Sylvain Madeleni was able to rely on the performance directors of each banner (a group of several sites). All of them were trained on monday.com to ensure the platform’s deployment and employee buy-in at every site.

A collaborative tool to make every subsidiary more efficient

Today, monday.com is deployed across several of the group’s business units and has more than 500 users (GMS, Food Service, Temperate and Dry Food, the sustainability department…): executive committee members, quality, HR, technical, operations, and all support departments.

Each management team has at least one steering board for its subsidiary (the executive committee’s action plan). This board gives a status overview and lets each subsidiary be tracked. It also makes it possible to set the subsidiaries a concrete objective and give the people in charge fact-based tracking.

A success, with plans for the future

Today, STEF’s subsidiaries have a clearer view of how their actions are progressing, which makes them more effective at moving projects forward. This efficiency is boosted in particular by key features such as conversation bubbles, which avoid email threads sent to far too many people.

Sylvain Madeleni’s next goal is to increase user adoption by rolling out an ever-wider range of features (automations, notifications). He is also considering workflows to track new employee onboarding, IT equipment, and other use cases along these lines.