Huber+Suhner, a fiber optic cable manufacturing company based in Switzerland, needed to find a solution to connect its 3,900 employees around the globe in a timely manner.

Thus, Huber+Suhner sought out to find a way to tackle these issues through collaboration and communication via an intranet solution. After looking at 20 different solutions, Huber+Suhner chose MangoApps because of its singular, browser-based platform that included up-to-date social and mobile communication tools.

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In this video, you will learn how Huber+Suhner used MangoApps to:

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1. Efficiently communicate and collaborate globally across multiple time zones
2. Unify employees with one tool that allows them to easily share knowledge with each other
3. Analyze the daily activities and project progress of different company teams around the world

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Full video transcript:

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Benjamin Ruegg, Project Manager:

“HUBER+SUHNER is a global working company. The headquarters are in Switzerland. We are globally about 3,900 employees. Half of it is working in Switzerland and basically, in every continent, we have some sales offices or production sites. It’s a global rollout in this case. So everybody around the globe will join.”

Urs Widmer, Global Chief Information Officer:

“MangoApps is really facilitating us in becoming a totally global company. I do see MangoApps as the next generation of collaboration platforms providing the latest technology trends, as well as the newest experiences from the market. From a technical point of view, I do see MangoApps as a good fit into our current, as well as into our future IT architecture. The challenge our employees have today is that they have to use too many different tools to collaborate. It is very difficult to find the latest version of the right information and to get to the right knowledge in an efficient way.”

Phil Ward, Market Manager for Data Centers:

“It’s a no-brainer. I mean, everyone’s searching for this magic tool that’s going to do everything and to be honest, MangoApps is the best tool I’ve ever seen for allowing multiple functionalities, and bilateral communication in an organization. I’m well behind the MangoApps initiative and I think it has the potential to change the way a company thinks and that’s a difficult thing to do because a big company is like an oil tanker in the sea. Trying to shift it from one area to the next is a difficult thing. But when you’ve got your collaboration, you’ve got multiple individuals working as a team, and the benefits are seen very quickly and that’s what we noticed when we deployed it.”

Reto Wenger, Project Manager:

“From [inaudible 00:02:10] they’re different criteria there. So it’s the modularity of the program. It’s easy to customize it. It comes out of the box with many functionalities. So it’s scalable. You can start small and you can just keep it growing. Then again, the development team, which amazed us with how fast they were developing the software in which direction it’s going. Ultimately I think that you can use it from any device, from anywhere and at any time. This was the further criteria to choose it.

We immediately daw this need for having virtual teams which can work and perform over country borders, that there can be a salesperson in China, a salesperson in the States, in England, in Switzerland and they can all work together on the same topic. So we created this infrastructure and set up this infrastructure to make this actually happen.

So the whole topic, E-collaboration was really new for us. So we started to do a lot of research, desktop research, looked into different reports, talked to different people in university and in companies and finally we created a long list of vendors and narrowed them down by criteria, like hosting options, etc, and had about 20 vendors on our list and then what we did, we started to jamming around within that software. So we took two or three days where we just had one hour on each software and started to jamming around and our idea was if we are not able to work within this tool within 40 minutes on a certain level, then the tool isn’t right for the company because our employees also have to work in there and that was the point where we really have been fascinated about MangoApps because, after 10 or 15 minutes, every one of us had set up his own project and we started to upload documents. We started to download the mobile client and immediately we’ve been able to really work in there.

The most important thing for us from our side was that’s intuitive to use and that we have a modular software at hand so that we can start small and then use additional options and functionality to grow the platform and another important thing was that as well the front end as the back end is kind of clean and it is easy to work in there, so also for guys which aren’t too much into IT. We had different criterias to keep in mind when we did this analysis on vendors. So one thing was the IT criteria. So we had to fit into our IT infrastructure. It had to be easy to plug in other systems into MangoApps or into another E-collaboration platform. Then we had our criteria list from the needs we found in the departments, which was criterias like it must be able to do ideation. We want to set up the new internet within this platform. We need a tool to be able to share knowledge and stuff like this. So with MangoApps, we found the whole [inaudible 00:05:08] of those functionalities within one tool.

Again, that it is intuitive and easy to use was probably the one criteria that really made us to choose MangoApps.

There’s definitely one use case to name. We created a global market group of data center market and in there we had the market manager, Phil Ward, which was really a forward thinking visionary person and immediately saw the value of this program. So he went up to my desk and told me to bring in his whole team and all his external people he’s working with and so we cracked this critical mass and had 60 people in this community, which immediately starting sharing their knowledge in there and put all their documents, files from all over the world within this group and so it kind of [inaudible 00:05:58] grew the whole community. He was really strict about it. He said, “This is the one tool we going to use and I’m not going to answer emails anymore.” So this really drove the people inside it and this was definitely the most important use case. We had different use cases also on support groups and on global projects.”

Benjamin Ruegg, Project Manager:

“For me, MangoApps is definitely a great tool to share knowledge very easily. I think it will be a very good function to find the right people around the globe with the right skills, where today we don’t know how to find them and this will certainly be a very important function. For me, MangoApps is basically social collaboration platform that includes all kind of function we could think of when we talk about collaboration. So it has basically the part of the internet functionality and it has the part of the file sharing functionality. It has the part of the discussions and so forth. So we have one platform for all types of different applications within social collaboration. The key benefits are definitely that it’s more transparent what is happening around the globe, that you will see what problems maybe arising in China and the persons in the USA can follow these kind of problems, may experience same kind of problems and they will get much better problem solving and knowhow management around the globe.”

Phil Ward, Market Manager for Data Centers:

“The first thing I used it for was identifying and collaborating with my global teammates. So we’ve hired a lot of new data center salespeople around the world and before MangoApps I couldn’t really communicate with them. It was very one-way communication and with MangoApps, it’s given me the ability to put a face behind the name and that’s the first thing and also, do we have regular bilateral communication with them? Before MangoApps, I didn’t really know what they were doing. I’m not saying that I’m trying to chase my guys and find out if they’re working or not. But I didn’t have the same level of interaction. So now I’m seeing communication not only between me and them, but also between them and others in the team. So I’m starting to see how the business is evolving and it’s allowed me to get a much better, broader detail on how the data center market is moving for HUBER+SUHNER and that’s a fantastic thing. The second thing I use it for is file retrieval. Before MangoApps, I used to save documents in lots of different places.

They were never accessible, not particularly well organized either, I must admit and because of MangoApps, we’ve been forced to structure our documentation much better and then as soon as we’ve got something of importance, we send it out to the world, if you like, and everyone can see it. This is great because it makes us more efficient. Before everyone was creating different documents on their own hardware. But they never really shared it with other people. So now we’re starting to see this sharing collaboration going on and that’s fantastic because we start to see what are the best documents that we’re creating and making sure that once we do something once, we share it with everyone. So it’s great copy paste functionality. In fact, just yesterday I used MangoApps for file retrieval myself and I had to give a presentation. I couldn’t get it onto the USB stick. So MangoApps was a perfect way in the hotel to upload it to the server, and retrieve it back from another computer. The other thing I use MangoApps for is if I want to do something, create a document with a team.

So let’s say I’ve got a strategy idea and I’m not sure whether it’s the right way to go. I’ll start creating a document. I’ll invite people to contribute to that document. We’ll share ideas. We’ll see the edits. We’ll see the revisions and then at the end of that document we’ll have a fantastic piece of work hopefully, because it’s not just me doing it. It’s a whole team of expertise.”

Reto Wenger, Project Manager:

“I’m definitely passionate about the software and I have tons of things I love about MangoApps. But the couple things which I love most, so for example, I love this little bit of freedom which MangoApps gives to me to access it from anywhere, anytime on any device. So it doesn’t matter if on my mobile phone, on my tablet, in the train or on my company computer. Another thing which I really love about MangoApps is this freshness and intuitivity which it comes with and there’s a thing on it. It’s also the name which I love and I’m not making fun of that. But the name MangoApps helped a lot to implement the program in the company. So everyone was talking about what is this MangoApps thing about couldn’t this be solved by this Mango thing? So this freshness, which the program and its name itself springs is something I really love.”

Chantal Eder, Community Manager:

“I like most of that it, first, very easy to use. It’s very intuitive to just click and where to click. You don’t have to read big explanation about the tool before you can use it. You can share information very easy. You can share information with a lot of people. You can ask questions directly to an information which is uploaded. So yeah, it’s more transparent. You have, in the end, more information.”

Phil Ward, Market Manager for Data Centers:

“It didn’t take long at all. I mean it’s very intuitive, very well structured. There’s a lot of features and functionality and you need to kind of cover one topic before you go into the next one. But I thought it was the simplest program I’ve ever used, to be honest. One of the good things about MangoApps and that the and tiny take feature about being able to capture a screenshot and do a video online also allows you to educate people very easily as well. So if you found something that you think works better or not, you can put it into a video and share it with your colleagues. So it’s kind of a self-learning platform as well.”

Reto Wenger, Project Manager:

“If someone in a similar position would ask me for advice, I would tell him to go straight forward. Go over it and convince the management of the business value of a platform like MangoApps and then go straight forward and that’s the most important thing for piloting it. Test the program and show a proof of concept. Show the benefits you can immediately deliver to the company. A second point is to identify the right use cases. So you need the right use cases and the right people behind it, which immediately see the benefits and are willing to use such and elaborate such a new way of working together. So it’s about going for quality rather than for quantity. So you don’t want to have the whole company within this software during the first three days. But you want to have the people which go into the software stay in the software. So you have to create additional value to every single user of the platform.

What we basically did with the MangoApps team, so we created a dedicated group inside of our own MangoApps platform, inside of the HUBER+SUHNER MangoApps platform and invited their specialists from the customer side, but as well from the technical side and this enabled us to work together with people from MangoApps in the States, in India, which are in different timezones in the way MangoApps is designed. So we could post in a certain thing into this platform and the next day it was solved and we had an answer in it and what definitely convinced us was the development team, which really fast developed functionalities. So we had this one example. We brought up an issue that we couldn’t have automatic updates all over the company because it wasn’t compatible with our IT infrastructure. So a couple weeks later we had this fixed and we had a button where we can just click and then the update wasn’t automatically anymore. So it was really easy to work together and fast problem solving.”

Chantal Eder, Community Manager:

“My role in the collaboration project is that I am responsible for the community management. This means I support the whole setup of the communities and drive the participation of each member in the groups. This includes also training, support, communication. Yeah, for me, the key benefit is in the end that we have more efficient collaboration and communication between each employees around the whole world. This means they can connect better to each other. They know who is working in which department. They can share files. They can share information easier than before because they have one tool everyone is working with. I think the most popular use cases are the groups and the projects who have members from different countries because then for me, the benefit of using E-collaboration is the biggest because there you have members who are not in the same room, who cannot just go to each other and give information. They have to send emails.

They have to use the phone and if you use an email and you send one information to a person, maybe another one needs the same and so you have a lot of emails between the employees and in MangoApps, there’s just one platform with all information on it. Our network will have the name together because we thought about what is the core of E-collaboration and for us it’s teamwork. It’s collaborating together and that’s why we said that our network will have the name together.

Together we are better.”

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