How Sodexo and Masadour innovated during the health crisis

During a press conference on February 10, 2022, Microsoft invited several of its customers to testify. Among them, Sylvia Métayer, director of growth strategy at Sodexo, and Olivier Cail, director of information systems and transformation at Maïsadour, spoke in particular about the role of the publisher’s technologies in their company over the past few years. years, especially during the health crisis.

Sodexo offers a full range of services to companies and individuals, ranging from catering to technical maintenance, from cleanliness to titles and benefits for employees, including personal services. “We have a wide variety of customers, with organizations of all sizes, healthcare establishments, companies like Microsoft or sites like the Eiffel Tower,” says Sylvia Métayer. “Our 400,000 employees serve 100 million customers every day. We are a French company with a global presence, established in 57 countries, and multilocal, with 40,000 sites. We chose to work with Microsoft to address all this complexity,” she continues. For Sodexo, it was indeed important to be able to rely on a player capable of providing “global technological power, both in infrastructure, cybersecurity and digital. The company has decided to have a single cloud solution, Azure, globally, and it also uses all the Microsoft 365 suite collaboration tools, including Teams and Yammer.

Reducing food waste with AI

Since 2018, Sodexo and Microsoft have been working together on innovation projects, a renewed partnership for the next five years. “Our playground is everyday life, the one that has been the most disrupted since the crisis. We want to be a technology company, to have an individual relationship with consumers, to simplify the lives of employees and customers. And data is at the heart of this strategy, to channel uses,” says Sylvia Métayer. Among the projects resulting from this cooperation is a solution called SoDynamix, designed with Accenture, to develop menu management and culinary production on site, or the facility management platform Wando, which digitizes user requests on site and their follow-up. , allowing a direct relationship with them. Finally, Sylvia Métayer cited the PowerChef solution, currently being tested, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to predict on-site traffic and consumption, in order to adjust services and reduce waste. “Before the pandemic, the solution gave slightly better forecasts than the experience of site managers, now they are much better,” says Sodexo’s director of growth strategy.

For Sylvia Métayer, this latest project is a good illustration of how technology can contribute to the challenges of sustainable growth, a subject on which the two companies agree. “At Sodexo, our first lever to reduce our carbon footprint is the fight against food waste, we need solutions like PowerChef”, underlines the director. For her, sustainable growth is what makes it possible to reconcile all of the company’s stakeholders, employees, customers and partners. “What Microsoft is doing to have a negative carbon footprint, we’re going to benefit as cloud customers,” she notes. Finally, Sylvia Métayer also mentioned another dimension of this collaboration, very local, with the cross-mentoring initiative “Diversité en Seine”, which brings together several companies based in Issy-les-Moulineaux to promote diversity.

Maïsadour puts innovation at the service of farmers

At Maïsadour too, the Microsoft cloud is an important lever for innovation. The agrifood cooperative group is organized into four areas of activity: agricultural production, gastronomy (Delpeyrat, Comtesse du Barry, etc.), poultry (Fermiers du Sud-Ouest) and seed production. “Contrary to appearances, there is a lot of innovation in an agricultural cooperative, especially around the Internet of Things (IoT) and data. This involves viewing the contents of a silo in real time, optimizing water management on a farm, monitoring crops by satellite, etc.,” explains Olivier Cail. All this connected equipment is linked to the group’s Microsoft environments, and the data thus collected is then made available to the technical sales teams, who can then advise the 8,000 farmers of the cooperative on the best way to treat their poultry or cultivate this or that plot.

Like everyone else, the group was surprised in 2020 by the suddenness and scale of the crisis. “We had to secure our 5,000 employees by allowing them to work in their personal environments. We quickly deployed Microsoft 365 and Teams, and we also opened the latter to our members, who are outside the organization,” says Olivier Cail. Before the crisis, Maïsadour had a plan to develop the use of collaborative tools and hoped to increase Teams traffic by 2 or 3. current time”, points out Olivier Cail. In 2022, the group wants to rely on this partnership to go further in the deployment of digital tools and intensify the use of IoT at the service of farmers and breeders. “The challenge is to help them manage their operations despite the climatic vicissitudes”, points out the DSI.