Download Energizer Workers Empowered to Energize the Business

The People-Ready Business
Case Study
Energizer Holdings
Energizer Workers Empowered to Energize the Business
from the Ground Up
Story at a Glance
Evolving consumer trends, a more demanding retail environment, and
intense global competition have forced Energizer, one of the world’s largest
producer of batteries, to rethink the way it does business. The company has
replaced its command-and-control management structure with an
empowered, collaborative, grass-roots–driven business model that aims to
give employees easy access to information and to one another, with the goal
of quickly delivering business value where it’s needed—in the trenches of
daily decision making.
Energizer has standardized on Microsoft® software to help employees
communicate faster, pool ideas, react sooner, and eliminate wasted time and
effort. Energizer’s philosophy is to empower every employee with all the
technology it can give them, to help them be as productive as possible.
Multiplied by 7,800, even small efficiencies add up to tremendous
companywide gains. Also, by tapping into the intelligence of smart employees
all over the world, Energizer can generate better ideas in less time, which
helps it stay ahead of customer demands and competitive threats.
The People-Ready Business Case Study
The New World of Work
Command-and-control
management structures
often cannot respond
quickly and effectively to
operational challenges.
Energizer has
democratized information
and decision making by
equipping its 6,800
knowledge workers with
the latest productivity and
communications software.
1
The People-Ready Business
Randy Benz is out to start a revolution—or
rather, thousands of mini revolutions. The
Vice President and Chief Information Officer
of Energizer Holdings had an epiphany
about how he could use the software on
7,800 knowledge workers’ desks to kickstart productivity one business task at a time
and snowball this productivity into significant
competitive advantage. Energizer shifted its
paradigm about when and why it should
upgrade desktop software when it realized
that employees could be incredible agents
for change and innovation when given the
right tools. Today, Energizer keeps
employees equipped with the latest and
greatest desktop software, to drive business
responsiveness and change at the grassroots level.
Keeping Up with Business
Acceleration
Since 1896, Energizer has been going
strong, like its Energizer Bunny, successfully
meeting and surmounting every challenge
that global markets, fickle consumers, and
demanding retail partners could throw at it.
However, the need to adapt, react, and
respond to change just never stops; in fact,
with Energizer’s business pushing into 165
countries, the challenges just seem to come
faster.
“Everything in our business is driving us to
be more nimble,” Benz says. “Consumer
tastes change more frequently; they expect
more innovation in products, packaging, and
merchandising. We have to innovate more
frequently to hold their attention. Retailers,
too, expect us to do more to help them
succeed—to bring new ideas to market
faster and get product on their shelves
sooner.” Of course, globalization has meant
that Energizer has even more competitors
trying to do the same things.
The People-Ready Business Case Study
All these market drivers have caused
Energizer’s overall business pace to
accelerate, which requires that workers
become increasingly collaborative.
Energizer’s old command-and-control
management structure inhibited the flow of
information to the people who needed to
make informed decisions on the front lines.
Manual business processes and outdated
software were barriers to employees
connecting and communicating in a flash.
And locating needed information in an
organization as big as Energizer chewed up
valuable time and caused a lot of redundant
work.
Vision: Anywhere to Anything
In 2004, Benz came up with a grand vision
for increasing employee speed and
effectiveness. He called it A2A—anywhere
to anything. His idea was that any employee
should be able to access any information,
stored in any application, from any other
application, using any device, at any time.
“We wanted to take all of our information off
of shared drives and put it in one place
where it was searchable, shareable, and
accessible from anywhere,” Benz says.
Lessons Learned

Consider familiarity and
ease of use when rolling
out new software.

Don’t be stingy with
information; distribute
information and
decision-making tools
The first thing Benz and his team did was to
deploy a new information-sharing platform
based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint®
Server 2007. Once the intranet portal was
launched, employees began creating
hundreds of collaboration sites where they
share documents and discussion boards
and manage a variety of everyday business
processes. Alerts let team members know
when something new is added to a site, and
built-in workflows automate common
activities such as document review and
approval, issue tracking, and signature
collection. “If our people can collaborate
better, it gives them a huge advantage in
as broadly as possible.

Encourage a culture of
empowerment that
enables and rewards
individual innovation
and decision-making.

Let the people lead.
When you ask the
people doing a job how
to make the job better,
you get incredible ideas.
2
The People-Ready Business
working with internal colleagues, partners,
and customers,” Benz says.
And there is very little work for IT staff,
because all of the new applications work
together out of the box.
Software Paradigm Shift
Energizer “bet the farm,” says Benz, on an
end-to-end Microsoft solution that he
believes is uniquely suited to meet the
needs of an empowered organization. “To
be accepted and successful, software has to
be familiar and easy to use,” says John
Tschannen, Director of End User Services
at Energizer. “Once people are familiar with
the Microsoft word processing, spreadsheet,
and e-mail programs, they’re immediately
familiar with the Microsoft collaboration,
presence, video conferencing, and instant
messaging programs.”
Once energized by collaboration sites and
easier information sharing, Energizer
employees wanted even more—and so did
Benz. “When I saw how collaboration sites
caught fire, I realized that we could be doing
so much more to boost the productivity and
innovation of our knowledge workers by
giving them better software tools,” he says.
Until then, Energizer had lethargically
updated its Microsoft Office productivity
programs, only to keep software updates
and support in place. However, those
upgrades had been so time-consuming that
employees’ desktop experience lagged the
state of the art by three to five years.
“We had a huge investment in these
products, but we weren’t using them as we
could have,” Benz says. “We realized that
we needed to stay ahead of the curve to
keep productivity and innovation up. Our
whole paradigm shifted. We suddenly
wanted to do everything we could to keep
the latest software on everyone’s desks. We
saw that we needed to empower every
employee with everything we had.”
Tools Everyone Should Have
Benz looked around and realized that all
7,800 knowledge workers already used
Microsoft Office productivity software every
day. He also saw that Microsoft had a wide
range of collaboration tools that
complemented its productivity software and
worked across multiple devices. So
Energizer standardized on Microsoft
software across the board. Every new
capability that Benz brings in has the same
familiar interface, so there’s practically no
learning curve or resistance to adoption.
The People-Ready Business Case Study
Tschannen says that the Microsoft pricing
model also supports broad-based user
empowerment. “Microsoft recognizes that
these tools are capabilities that everyone in
an organization should have,” he says.
“License fees for many other collaboration
and performance management solutions
make them elitist tools. We want to deploy
thousands, not dozens or hundreds, of
copies, and the Microsoft pricing model
scales easily.”
“We suddenly wanted
to do everything we
could to keep the latest
software on everyone’s
desks. We saw that we
needed to empower
every employee with
In addition to taking a “we’ll have one of
everything” approach to desktop software,
Energizer has moved to accessing its
software through Microsoft Online Services,
which speeds the deployment of new
applications and minimizes IT costs. Within
a couple of months of a product’s release,
all 7,800 knowledge workers have the latest
productivity-boosting software on their
desks.
everything we had.”
Randy Benz, Vice President and Chief
Information Officer, Energizer Holdings
Thousands of Mini Revolutions
Energizer has used its new software arsenal
to boost productivity, speed
communications, and automate processes
3
The People-Ready Business
one individual and business task at a time,
depending on the multiplication effect to do
the rest. “No single tool has revolutionized
the company,” Benz says. “Rather, we’ve
had thousands of mini revolutions across
our workforce that have cumulatively yielded
an enormous impact. It’s the antithesis of a
mammoth SAP implementation, which is all
about centralized change. This is about local
change multiplied 6,000 times.”
For example, Tschannen headed up the
effort to upgrade all of Energizer’s desktop
computers to Microsoft Office Professional
2007 to take advantage of new ease-of-use
features that boost productivity. Additionally,
employees can use these newer programs
to access line-of-business (LOB)
applications from within the familiar
Microsoft Office system. For example,
employees can export data from LOB
applications into spreadsheets, and then
access those spreadsheets through the
collaboration sites. Any time the LOB data is
updated, the information is automatically
updated in the spreadsheets.
Other examples: Carol Knotts, Senior
Account Manager at Energizer, drove the
use of electronic forms to speed business
processes from procurement to shipping.
Instead of routing paper forms from person
to person for completion and approval,
Energizer puts electronic forms on a
SharePoint site where members of multiple
teams can view and track them
simultaneously.
Buff Buffkin, Director of Human Resources
at Energizer, implemented the use of the
Microsoft desktop Web and audio
conference service so that employees all
over the world can participate in quarterly
town hall–style meetings in which
management shares earnings, updates, and
direction for the upcoming quarter.
Previously, these meetings were limited to
The People-Ready Business Case Study
just a few U.S. sites that had the appropriate
videoconferencing equipment; now,
everyone can participate.
Krista Ogle, Director of Internal Audit at
Energizer, encouraged company auditors to
use presence, instant messaging, and
collaboration software to instantly
communicate with colleagues from remote
locations, post findings to collaboration
sites, and reduce the travel time and cost of
audits. Audit managers at headquarters can
keep abreast of audit progress almost in real
time, rather than waiting for end-of-day
reports.
By replacing its command-and-control
management style with one that provides
both information and analytical tools to
hundreds of “difference-makers” on the front
lines, Energizer has seen significant
improvements in business planning and
forecasting. “Over the last five years, our
stock price has skyrocketed and we’ve been
able to make two major acquisitions: Schick
Wilkinson Sword and Playtex Products,”
Benz says. “People have made this happen.
We’re building a culture of empowerment in
which people make decisions, and creative
ideas surface from the bottom up. Every
day, people come to work knowing that they
can make a difference to the business. That
changes the culture in a very profound way.”
Executive Biography
Randy Benz has been Vice President
and Chief Information Officer for
Energizer Holdings since 1996. He’s
been with Energizer for 22 years and
has more than 28 years in the
consumer products industry. He
received a Bachelor’s Degree in
Accounting from Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale and is
married with four daughters.
Seven Thousand Heads Are
Better Than One
By empowering every employee with
“everything we have,” Energizer is boosting
each individual’s productivity by a few
minutes to an hour per day—and multiplying
those gains by 7,800. Perhaps more
importantly, Energizer is bringing the
intelligence and ideas of talented employees
all over the world to bear on market
challenges. “Having people put their ideas
4
The People-Ready Business
together to solve a problem is better than
trying to solve it individually,” Tschannen
says. “We’ve made it easy for employees to
find one another and the information they
need, work together efficiently,
communicate results convincingly, and
move quickly once decisions are made.”
Today, Energizer is better able to embrace
what’s coming and keep its business ahead
of the curve by using familiar, trusted
software that empowers employees in
everything they do. “Microsoft software
helps keep us nimble,” Benz says. “We don’t
know what the future holds, but we know the
challenges will be tough because they
always have been. We think we’re in good
shape, because we’ve given the best
possible capabilities to the largest number of
users so that everyone can contribute
effectively.”
Customer Details:
Energizer Holdings
Phone: (800) 383-7323
Web site: www.energizer.com
The People-Ready Business
A people-ready business is one
where people can apply their
unique skills, insights, and
experience to create new products
and services, work responsively
with customers and partners, and
drive operational excellence in
every aspect of the business.
People-ready businesses support
people with knowledge, practices,
and tools so that they can add the
extra value that helps differentiate
successful organizations in a
competitive, fast-moving global
economy.
www.microsoft.com/peopleready
Software and Services
Microsoft® Office Communications
Server 2007
Microsoft Office InfoPath® 2007
Microsoft Office Professional 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint®
Server 2007
Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published June 2008
The People-Ready Business Case Study
5