How Lavazza modernized digital processes and connected IT & business teams

This post is based on Lavazza’s session at Atlassian’s Team ’24 Europe, “Redesigning digital processes to meet the needs of business and IT teams.” You can also check out all sessions from the event on-demand and learn more about how Atlassian’s customers get the most out of our products.

From humble beginnings in 1895, Lavazza now operates in over 140 global markets with upwards of 5,500 employees.

In 2019, Lavazza realized that it needed to modernize its tools and processes to remain competitive against a growing number of coffee brands. At the time, their demand planning revolved around an outdated practice of spreadsheets and email with no central data set, while business requests were handled manually in Word and Excel.

To handle this, they partnered with Hinto®Group which specializes in future-proof solutions by guiding companies through tech adoption. Through this strategic partnership, they were able to optimally combine global business and IT needs in a highly complex digital environment.

In this blog, we’ll explore how the Hinto®Group and Lavazza partnered to strengthen their tools and processes for the next 100 years of operation.

Integrating three worlds into a single ecosystem

Lavazza leveraged the Hinto®Group to help rid them of silos and allow for enterprise-wide visibility, especially across demand planning, business requests, and IT enhancement. At this point, all three of these were managed separately on separate tools:

• Demand Planning: Processes were manually entered and entirely managed on Excel and email
• Business Requests: Requests were manually entered in Word and Excel
• IT Enhancements: This process was managed between respective subscriptions of Jira Service Management and Confluence

Lavazza’s disconnection resulted in fragmentation and inconsistent terminology across functions leading to long waiting times and slow processes. After a careful assessment, Hinto®Group identified that Lavazza would benefit from integrating all three processes in a single ecosystem on a unified platform.

To optimize Lavazza’s transition towards a unified ecosystem, Hinto®Group conducted an assessment of the enterprise’s needs.

Hinto®Group identified four key areas to prioritize:

• Relationship management across Lavazza and its subsidiaries 
• Vendor management of external suppliers
• Optimizing the use of plugins to contain recurring license costs
• Monitoring project performance

With these focus pillars in place, Hinto®Group also identified specific challenges that could be addressed comprehensively on a unified platform:

• Unclear request statuses
• Incomplete design workflows
• Unstructured, inaccurate KPIs and performance metrics
• Hard-to-follow communication
• Inefficient handling times
• High chance of human error during hand-offs

Setting goals for IT and business teams

Exploring the collaborative pain points and modernization needs of Lavazza’s IT, marketing, sales, and customer-facing teams, Hinto®Group came up with these enhancement processes:

• Demand Planning: Structured, automated processes to help with executing marketing requests.
• Business Requests: Clear, standardized specifications allow teams to address daily requests across all digital touchpoints.
• IT Enhancements: Early alignment on expectations to help IT teams quickly identify misunderstandings to ultimately reduce time-to-market and improve the quality of output.

Step 1: Assessment with an expert in service design and ITIL 

Actions taken: 

Lavazza and Hinto®Group held multiple workshops at Lavazza’s headquarters where they mapped out a process to handle demand planning, business requests, and IT enhancements. During these sessions, they focused on the mapping component while analyzing existing processes.

Result: 

Through these sessions, they developed a service blueprint depicting the entire service delivery process. The blueprint included a list of all actions to be taken at each stage and related roles identified.

Step 2: Development

Actions taken: 

With the help of Hinto®Group, Lavazza migrated all of its business and technology activities onto the Atlassian Cloud platform using ITIL best practices. They also implemented structured, optimized, and integrated projects to the platform for easier management.

Result: 

All solutions to handle the needs of demand planning, business requests, and IT enhancements were now centralized on the Atlassian platform.

Step 3: Delivery

Actions taken: 

Once all stakeholders validated the new workflows and features, the new processes were activated while closely monitoring the adoption process.

Result: 

After leveraging a heavy strategic change management approach, all Lavazza stakeholders were onboarded to their respective systems within the Atlassian platform.

Step 4: Support and review

Actions taken: 

Closely monitor all tools, processes, and stakeholders across Lavazza using the Atlassian platform.

Result: 

There was better communication, more accessible data, and a “calmer environment” across Lavazza. Templates streamlined their centralized demand management, and Atlassian Analytics helped monitor metrics and collaboration.

A collaborative approach to digital transformation

To reach the agreed-upon goals, the project was mapped out over multiple phases consistent in characteristics, specifications, and deliverables. It was to start with a deep assessment and service design stage, followed by a development stage, a delivery stage, and a review stage.

Before embarking on the project, Lavazza and Hinto®Group identified Atlassian solutions to handle the needs of the IT and business teams:

• Jira for requirement collections, project management, task management, dashboards, bug tracking, and reporting
• Confluence to host a single source of truth, a solutions wiki, project streams, and knowledge management
• Jira Service Management to handle demand management, business request management, SLA monitoring, and reporting

Lavazza’s achievements by partnering with Hinto®Group and Atlassian

Using a strategic partner to help map out and execute their modernization process allowed Lavazza to experience immediate results. Keeping a close eye on the adoption process, Lavazza found:

• A significant reduction in business reports
• Enterprise-wide visibility for stakeholders into all aspects of work
• Improved collaboration on projects and service requests
• Enhanced and efficient SLA and KPI monitoring

These achievements highlighted three massive learnings from their modernization process. First, they realized that untangling processes to boost efficiency can be streamlined when teaming up with the right strategic partner. 

From there, and maybe the biggest lesson, they found the importance of having the entire operations work on a centralized platform. This way, even though teams can customize tools to their own processes and workflows, all of the data remains in the same place.

Last, they found that Jira and Confluence, used in tandem, can facilitate better alignment by offering a single source of truth for projects and general operations.

What works for IT can work across teams

Teams across the globe struggle to overcome enterprise-wide challenges caused by tool sprawl, organizational silos, and outdated processes. The Atlassian Cloud platform allows teams to integrate tools and processes on a unified data set, allowing teams more time to innovate.

IT leaders can empower all teams across their enterprise with Jira for work planning and tracking, Confluence as the single source of truth for organizational knowledge, and Jira Service Management for request intake and ticket tracking.

Structured process transformation is critical to creating a unified, efficient digital environment. With the help of Atlassian and Hinto®Group, Lavazza created an integrated system that supports efficiency, visibility, and more. Learn more about how our work management tools, Jira and Confluence, can help unify your teams more effectively.