Case Study:

Helping the Adecco Group Achieve Operational Excellence & Save Millions

Vantage Clever partnered with The Adecco Group – one of the world’s leading Recruitment Companies. Each year, The Adecco Group provides approximately 700,000 people around the world with career opportunities including temporary staffing, permanent placement, career transition and talent development, outsourcing and consulting.

They are a Fortune Global 500 company, based in Zurich, Switzerland, with more than 33,000 FTE employees and approximately 5,100 branches in 60 countries and territories around the world meaning operational excellence was key to the success of the marketing function.

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The transformation & its high

level benefits

Marketing efforts were carried out as siloed activities within individual countries. Over 480 marketing colleagues were executing local and global marketing activities via their own bespoke processes, technology and suppliers. Brand was compromised, tools were duplicated and resources were utilised ineffectively.

The global transformation initiative which is recently just completed, has seen common tools, methodologies and operating models rolled out to all countries which will deliver:

Millions in cost savings from streamlining across people, suppliers and technologies
Improved brand consistency across the group
Shared efficiency and improved speed to market
Shared best practice and repurpose of high performing campaigns

The investment to achieve these benefits
In comparison to the cost savings produced, only a small investment was needed to stand up 3 Marketing Operations Shared Service Centres in Europe, The Americas and APAC (the minimum required to service the global time zones effectively) which now serve The Adecco Group’s entire Global Marketing community. As well as this, industry leading Marketing technologies were researched and acquired to enable best in class marketing practices for all countries to benefit from, resulting in mass decommissioning of duplicate tools and suppliers.

Workfront was the chosen Project Management tool to improve global communication and asset sharing, it’s implementation has been key to the collaborative success of the transformation.

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Headcount reduction and redeployment

By introducing collaborative processes using marketing automation tools, the marketing colleagues within The global Adecco Group structure could be reduced by 14% over 3 years. Some of these colleagues could be redeployed into other areas of the business or moved into the shared service centres themselves as a centre of excellence of individuals supporting local countries in best marketing practices was also created.

Increase of best in class technology, decrease of duplicated suppliers

Using the power of a combined group purchase for cost effectiveness, the best technology was procured and implemented for the whole Group to utilise. This led to a huge decommission of tools across the organisation yielding significant savings which by far outweighed the waste in duplication. It also enabled some of the smaller, less profitable countries to benefit from tools they would never normally be able to afford access to alone. What’s more, it brought the maturity level of marketing up in all countries and reduced the void between low and high performing teams.

Brand consistency and automation

Choosing a key dynamic marketing management tool has reduced hours of marketing time in administering requests for simple sales materials that can now be sourced and branded appropriately by each country, brand or individual requesting them within the business. The link directly to a single European asset production supplier is another added process improvement and significant cost saving being exploited by the client.

Safeguarding the global budget

Historically, there was no single budget approval process locally and no global oversight which led to a lack of budget control and absence of return on investment being reported. Vantage Clever designed and implemented a marketing governance framework to bring local countries together to discuss and approve activity as one. This promoted shared understanding of activities, accountability of spend locally and reported ROI of all marketing activities delivered by the Group. Using Workfront, this process has been automated for remote capabilities and instant collaboration.

A final thought

The Global Transformation has not only yelled significant cost savings but it has also driven a more structured Governance & Approvals process, increased SLA performance and enabled better resource management. Adecco now has more visibility of their AHT and dormant activity, enabling them to make more informed decisions and spend their marketing budgets where appropriate. The shared service centres are providing consistent, quality assets to the global marketers and offering specialist advice in best practice marketing activities, further accelerating the Group’s marketing maturity.

Finally, no matter the size or budget of the country, each one can benefit from the global acquisition of marketing technology they may not previously have been able to afford allowing them to accelerate their marketing activities and return greater revenue for the business.

Operational excellence is our business and we care about helping our clients to succeed.