Lesaffre, a major player in the global fermentation industry, chose Orange Business and its teams of certified Microsoft experts to help develop custom-built business software that would help the company reach a new milestone in its digital transformation – notably in terms of collaborative user features.

Orange Business: a full-fledged technical partner

While the general public may not be instantly familiar with the Lesaffre name, the group has been a leader in the global fermentation industry for over a century.

With Orange Business providing support for the company’s digital transition, Lesaffre created a coordination center to assist its various entities in ensuring that real-world user experiences are fully taken into account in every development project. A highly satisfied Peter Quiguer, the Group’s Digital Coordinator, had this to say: “Over the years Orange Business has established itself as our technological partner, helping us adapt tools from the Microsoft 365 suite – such as SharePoint, Teams and many others – to suit our specific user needs.”



The response from Orange went far beyond a simple technical solution – they provided a global framework for the project, ensuring the user experience was its central focus.



 

Peter Quiguer, Digital Coordinator, Lesaffre

A custom-designed, user-focused solution

In order to improve collaboration and interactions between staff involved in the industrial baking process, Lesaffre selected an Orange Business solution offering custom-designed software development with a focus on the user experience. “Their expertise with low-code constitutes a powerful asset for us when it comes to tools like Power BI, Power Platform, Power Apps, etc.,” specified Peter Quiguer. Low-code development provides a development environment that is used to create application software via a graphic user interface, rather than traditional “hand-coded” programming.

One practical example involved the creation of a tool for booking rooms in the company’s Baking Centers, which was completed in a very short timeframe using an iterative model. Though locally designed, this solution was expanded to the entire group in 2022.

“Early on, we decided to deploy these low-code and no-code tools, as they enable us to test ideas rapidly, without necessarily going through a long development process. Moreover, they enable us to avoid “shadow IT,” i.e., the development of solutions that operate outside the Group’s IT. In this way, thanks to low-code, our staff gains the ability to upgrade and enhance their own tools with just a little bit of training,” explained Peter Quiguer.

A pragmatic and certified approach

The response from Orange went far beyond a simple technical solution – they provided a global framework for the project, ensuring the user experience was its central focus,” added Peter Quiguer. This was followed by a series of workshops, enabling a solution that fully addresses the Group’s user requirements.

In addition, all of the Orange staff working on the Lesaffre projects were Microsoft-certified, enabling them to guarantee long-term solutions that meet industry standards. “They brought a systematically pragmatic approach – all our projects are completed via iterations and sprints, which enable us to test, validate and reject solutions as they progress, in order to achieve results that meet our needs,” concluded Peter Quiguer.

A tool for booking rooms in the Baking Centers completed in a very short timeframe using the Microsoft 365 suite