Ausolan is a leading brand in service management for restaurants, cleaning, catering and events. Ausolan uses Dropbox Business to improve operations at scale, facilitate internal/external collaboration and improve customer relationships by providing the whole organization and stakeholders with a flexible solution to access, organize and share content anytime, any place.
Ausolan's Key Results
Unifying 17 offices, 16 central kitchens and 13,000 employees into one system
Operating at scale with access to business and product information anytime, any place
Seamless collaboration essential for Ausolan's research and development projects
The challenge
Bringing teams together and better serving customers
Ausolan is a large corporation with many diverse projects. The company has 17 offices and 16 central kitchens in Spain and a presence in France and Chile. Despite operating in a traditional sector, Ausolan has always stood out for its technology, improving processes to provide a better service to its clients, workers, and members. Ausolan has introduced new technologies in recent years, such as a payment management system for school kids and 3D food printing—which is the process of manufacturing food products using a variety of additive manufacturing techniques (still in its preliminary stages).
The company’s growth strategy focuses on catering to their clients’ needs and providing them with safe, healthy, sustainable, and tasty products, while also diversifying into new businesses and markets. As it expanded, the company realized it needed a technological tool to optimize management workflows, improve internal communication, and access business and product information from any location on any device, thereby improving its offering to partners and clients.
The solution and key results
Finding a one-stop-shop for project management
Many employees already knew Dropbox, and that made it an attractive option from the outset. After testing other providers on the market, the company realized that Dropbox stood out for its ease of use, interoperability, ease of access, and fast synchronization. Dropbox Business was their solution of choice.
Four years on, the solution is used by almost every employee to organize, plan, and share work with their colleagues. From purchasing food to preparing menus for educational institutions, managing stock in hospitals, organizing events for clients’ product launches, and managing logistics for catering deliveries, everyone involved in a project is an active Dropbox user and benefits from its wide range of functions.
Dropbox has also been essential for developing other products currently going through R&D at Ausolan:
- The circular economy: the tool facilitates a sustainable way of working, minimizing the use of paper and the need for teams to travel to meetings.
- Industry 4.0: Ausolan can coordinate work between different technological centers.
- New products and food: more interaction between different project teams working on new recipes and developments with Dropbox as their collaborative platform.
The CIO and team leaders provide internal training to workers on how to use and test Dropbox. They have regular workshops to introduce the tool and cover any improvements that are relevant for their workers.
"Ausolan's added value comes from the professionalism of our staff and the differentiation of our services. Dropbox plays a key role in the technological infrastructure we need to meet that goal, helping us to work faster and better, in both our internal and external processes."
Ausolan & Dropbox in 2020
Supporting Ausolan during the COVID-19 pandemic
Dropbox has been key for Ausolan’s management team; having to urgently enable with remote working, so employees could continue to work seamlessly from multiple locations. Ausolan worked very hard to continue serving schools, businesses, hospitals, and other sectors during the pandemic. And Dropbox was central to that success.
Here are just a few examples of where Ausolan and Dropbox partnered to tackle the task of continuing to serve clients—during a pandemic:
- Programming Department: for this department, working from home would have been unthinkable just a few years ago due to the huge amounts of information they handle on a daily basis. However, despite the current climate, some of the team have been able to work remotely with highly satisfactory results thanks to Dropbox and Ausolan’s new Enterprise Resource Planning solution.
- Operators: thanks to Dropbox, they have been able to access all the information they need directly in the cloud. Data is categorized and organized into folders, and—most importantly—shared with colleagues. This has ensured reliable and efficient business continuity, especially for client-facing operations.
- Prevention: Dropbox has made it much easier to communicate the new healthcare guidelines to all employees by providing a common folder that everyone at the company can access at any time, and from any location. Employees receive timely information about the decisions being taken to protect their health during the pandemic.
"We know how important it is to complete our work on time and to the highest quality for our clients. And during the pandemic, that would not have been possible without Dropbox."
About Ausolan
- First collective catering company, with 100% national equity.
- Turnover of €230 million in 2018.
- Accounts for 90% of catering services for collectives, 9% of professional services (cleaning), and 1% of events and gourmet catering.
- The company serves more than 260,000 meals per day in schools, businesses, hospitals, and residential homes.
- Gives 10% of its profits to over 100 charitable projects. Ausolan has helped 300 organizations in the last five years.
- The Mondragon Corporation has more than 2,200 client centers throughout the country.
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