Founded in Geneva in 1948, the International Road Transport Union (IRU) is the world global road transport organization. They represent the entire industry – bus, coach, taxi, and truck operators – and drive the sustainable mobility of people and goods across the planet. They are the voice of more than 3.5 million companies in over 80 countries and enable millions of journeys across the planet every day. “The road transport industry is one of the most active, dynamic and constantly moving businesses that I know of,” says Cédric Oelhafen, Associate Director IS / IT at IRU Geneva.
One of the goals of the IRU is to represent its members and drive the industry forward, identifying the most important challenges and discussing options with the industry and its regulators, users, suppliers, and partners. Their objective is also to influence and lead the development and implementation of the right solutions (harmonized rules and standards, global partnerships, certification models, etc….). Smooth and timely collaboration across members and countries is therefore essential to support these ambitions. “We were still working in a traditional way, sharing and re-consolidating documents via email. And our tailor-made Document Production platform was relying on soon-to-become obsolete technologies”, explains Cédric Oelhafen. Faced with hard deadlines, IRU decided it was time to make a significant change and take their internal collaboration to the next level. “Office 365 and Microsoft 365 became the best choice to revamp our in-house Document Production platform and modernize our IT, discovering a new way to collaborate while still taking in account our very specific business needs.”
“The new paradigm means users can now work simultaneously on the same document, which is quite a revolution at the IRU. As our latest user survey shows, people love that they can collaborate on the same files at the same time and review each other’s work in real time!” says Cédric Oelhafen, Associate Director IS / IT at IRU Geneva
Initiating the Cloud journey
As the first step towards their overall transformation and vision, IRU chose to leverage the capabilities of the Microsoft 365 platform to fully reshape their Document Management solution, the heart and core component of the entire collaboration eco-system. A Product Definition Workshop was conducted together with the IT team and Business representatives to understand the legacy solutions (as-is systems and ways of working); to identify the potential improvements and changes in working habits; and eventually shape a solution addressing the business needs while enabling new collaboration use cases. Leveraging SharePoint Online, Power Automate and Graph API, a new collaborative document management platform was then implemented. This new solution brings new ways to work together and more features such as collaborative editing, accessing, and collaborating from anywhere, simpler document and template management, secure sharing, and more. It also makes it easier to automate processes like document edition, translation, approval, and online publication workflows. As Office 365 features are added to the organization, users will have even more ways to improve their work. After this initial phase, a project was done to deploy their cloud technology and implement the business solution. In parallel to the introduction of the Cloud technology in the organization landscape, training sessions were delivered to upskill and certify the internal technical teams – a key condition to support a successful transformation.
“Today, the solution is in full use within the organization, and has entered a cycle of functional additions and enhancements. The new paradigm means users can now work simultaneously on the same document, which is quite a revolution at the IRU “says Cédric Oelhafen. Cloud-based collaboration helped IRU improve their productivity and efficiency by enabling them to work from anywhere, at any time, and access information wherever they are. “As our latest user survey shows, people love that they can collaborate on the same files at the same time and review each other’s work in real time!”
Setting a vision for the future workplace
Moving forward, the company will be exploring more opportunities with Microsoft 365. They have already planned to rollout One Drive and migrate enterprise Shared Drives to Sharepoint Online, bringing collaboration to the next level. “We want to empower our users with state-of-the-art tools that allow them to facilitate their daily work and communicate smoothly,” explains Cédric Oelhafen. “Our goal is to champion excellence in road transportation, and it comes with the most efficient tools”.
