Global technology business Ocado Group is receiving Slack’s Excellence Award – United Kingdom for using Slack to facilitate effortless remote communication and intuitive workflows among its people, systems, partners and customers.
What started in a single-room office in 2000 is now a global software and automation platform business with leading capabilities in artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics. The company provides cutting-edge e-commerce, fulfilment and logistics solutions to some of the world’s largest grocery retailers. Initially adopted in 2015, Slack is now used across Ocado Group, with the company switching to Enterprise Grid in September 2021.
To build, develop and deploy the most innovative technology, Ocado Group’s employees work mainly in Slack channels, digital spaces to share crucial feedback, digital tools and files. By streamlining collaboration, employees stay agile and are able to execute better products more quickly by experimenting, testing and prototyping.
Removing the limits of physical walls, Slack gives Ocado Group’s global teams the autonomy to do their best work where, when and how they prefer. For a recent steering committee collaboration, the team used Slack clips to meet asynchronously, reducing intensive hour-long meetings to five-minute video clips, with actionable feedback posted in Slack threads.
Leadership teams have used clips to share updates in a dedicated Slack channel and conducted ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) chats, both of which help to establish transparent and two-way conversations with the teams, build trust and create excitement about the latest successes. As the company scales, this asynchronous way of working is especially crucial to support teams across time zones and schedules.
Ocado Group is empowering teams to automate tasks across the organisation thanks to Slack’s Workflow Builder and integration library. For example, one workflow helps to triage internal support requests. In IT, the team manages incidents with PagerDuty and fields in-channel project updates with Jira. To track the hundreds of projects that Ocado Group has at any given moment, it has created a workflow that pulls updates from Jira straight into project-specific Slack channels; these are based on triggers customised to the information that each team would like prioritised.
Ocado Group also uses Slack Connect to extend secure, channel-based messaging to external partners and vendors, facilitating seamless communication across organisational boundaries.
Working both internally across different departments and externally with customers and suppliers, there are more than 50 Slack champions helping different departments get the most of the platform and embrace a productivity platform, allowing Ocado Group to connect its teams, partners and tools.
