SavoirsPlus: a digital transformation consulting engagement

The SavoirsPlus story began in 1955 with Sadel, a bookstore and stationery shop founded by an activist movement that wanted to make education accessible to all. Over the years, Sadel brought the publishing companies NLU and Lira into the fold. Then, in 2020, the group became SavoirsPlus, the “cooperative serving knowledge.” Specializing in the distribution of educational supplies to public institutions, the company is committed to continuously improving the quality of its services. That is why it turned to Synolia for consulting on the implementation of a global digital platform.

SavoirsPlus modernizes its mail-order sales model

SavoirsPlus is a worker cooperative (SCOP) with more than 160 employee-members committed to expanding access to knowledge. It specializes in the distribution of school supplies, books, stationery, arts and crafts, games and toys… It mainly serves schools (from daycare centers to elementary, middle, and high schools) and recreation centers, using a mail-order sales model. Historically, SavoirsPlus customers placed their orders from the printed catalog (shipped throughout France) using a paper order form.

A print medium used for many years that is now giving way to digital tools.

So, to modernize and improve the quality of its services, the company launched several digital transformation projects around its e-commerce platform and customer relationships.

The SavoirsPlus brief

Consulting to support its digital transformation and define a complete, efficient, and sustainable DXP.

For several years, SavoirsPlus had been rolling out various digital building blocks to modernize its information system and offer new services to its customers. But by developing so many solutions in-house, it found itself having to build a high-level technical team to maintain and modernize them. That is why it decided to rethink its organization and its information system. And despite the specific nature of its business, it wanted to explore implementing market solutions with a cloud approach.

The SavoirsPlus IT department then set out to find a partner that could advise and support it through its digital transformation. A partner able to assess whether market solutions were suited to its business. If so, which ones? With what budget? And on what timeline?

This consulting assignment also covers several workstreams: evolving the technical environment, improving the employee experience when managing the site in the back office, improving the customer experience on the site…

Synolia x Digital eXperience Platform

The SavoirsPlus teams met Synolia through Akeneo PIM, as Synolia is a Gold integration partner for the solution. They recognized our expertise in e-commerce and CRM consulting and asked for our support.

Our services for SavoirsPlus: interviews and group workshops to scope requirements, help choosing the search engine (Algolia) and support for the current agency during implementation, consulting and recommendations on e-commerce and customer relationship solutions.

A better customer and employee experience

Thanks to the Akeneo PIM upgrade with Synolia in 2020, SavoirsPlus product pages are more detailed, richer, and designed for the web. This allowed the company to upgrade the search engine it had put in place ten years earlier. With Synolia’s support, SavoirsPlus integrated Algolia and identified areas for improvement to make searching easier for its customers (personalized results, product variants…).

Today, the company is continuing to improve the customer (and employee) experience with a project to rebuild its e-commerce site (responsive site, new standard features) and by implementing new customer relationship management tools.

To that end, Synolia is involved in the pre-project phase, providing consulting and solution recommendations to keep the company’s technical and functional foundation sustainable over time while staying modern.

Method, consulting, and a human approach

Synolia conducted its consulting assignment across functions, taking into account business needs and how the different building blocks of the SavoirsPlus digital ecosystem complement one another. All while remaining neutral and transparent in its solution proposals.

The work began with a series of interviews and group workshops with stakeholders from the various digital transformation projects. This new way of working was highly praised by the SavoirsPlus leadership team. Since the PIM and search engine project, a relationship of trust has developed between Synolia and the SavoirsPlus project teams. Communication is easy, and the workshops proved particularly effective, even for remote employees.

Looking back…

Since our engagement, SavoirsPlus has adopted a working-group approach, bringing together employees from different departments for its other transformation projects. These working groups have no hierarchy at all and make it possible to gather everyone’s input, especially from those who use the tools.

Today, building on Synolia’s recommendations, SavoirsPlus continues to co-build its digital platform around e-commerce and customer relationships. Next step with Synolia: prioritizing and supporting the projects to launch starting in 2023. All while taking into account ROI, the availability of SavoirsPlus teams, and the implementation timeline of each project.