About Glas Trösch Holding AG
The Swiss Glas Trösch Holding AG was founded in 1905 and is today the largest family-owned glass manufacturing and processing company in Europe with more than 70 sites and around 6,000 employees. In 2017, the subsidiary Euroglas was the first site to introduce the Q.wiki management system, which was eventually successfully rolled out across the entire company.
The challenge before implementing Q.wiki
Euroglas Germany, one of our sites, introduced Q.wiki in 2017 to create uniform documentation with added value for all employees. The aim was to transform the pure verification documentation for audits into process descriptions and work instructions that make everyday work easier for colleagues. It was important to involve all employees: In the future, they would play an active role in shaping the documentation and keeping it up to date.
A group of companies with over 6,000 employees and more than 70 sites across Europe naturally has a lot of redundant documentation: each site creates its own management system and documents process descriptions and work instructions, but these also apply to other sites. This redundant documentation, with no interfaces between the individual sites, was to be merged into a common software solution in the long term.
The decision for Q.wiki
Q.wiki provides space for both group-wide documentation and site-specific regulations. The reduction of duplicate work and the simplified training of new employees alone promised a significant reduction in the workload for colleagues. This was an important factor in selecting the new management software. Q.wiki's interactive approach, intuitive operation and simple approval workflow also played a major role in the decision.
Once Q.wiki had been successfully established as a knowledge platform at Euroglas Germany, we started talks for a group-wide rollout in 2018. The matrix certification with Q.wiki was also a decisive factor: All sites have to fulfil certain conditions for the entire group to be certified. Of course, we had already been working with central specifications in the past - but the common system has made it even easier to distribute, manage and check certification-relevant specifications.
The introduction of Q.wiki
Together with Modell Aachen, we developed a plan to introduce Q.wiki first at the head office and then to roll it out to the individual sites. And it worked like a charm! It was based on central, group-wide processes that we defined together in workshops. The first step was to create a common framework for our documentation. Then each site was given its own section in Q.wiki. Employees gradually added their site-specific specifications to this area. Thanks to a high level of self-motivation and good project marketing, Q.wiki became known throughout the group at an early stage and was quickly adopted by everyone.
Once the basic framework was in place, we worked with Modell Aachen to train selected employees at the individual sites in the use of interactive management systems. Our central QM team held process and project management workshops with the local contacts, so Q.wiki was quickly filled with useful content. Following the train-the-trainer principle, they in turn trained their team members. For unanswered questions, we offered Group-wide question and answer sessions, which provided an additional boost to familiarization.
In this way we minimized external costs while involving as many employees as possible at an early stage. The fact that the responsibility for individual processes now lay with the local knowledge holders motivated the process owners to actively participate in the system. As the initiators, we were particularly pleased about this.
Success with Q.wiki
The successes with Q.wiki are noticeable throughout the group. And we can prove it with figures:
Interactive management system with thousands of hits per month.
We are seeing a strong increase in logins - and this has been continuous since 2019. 43 sites have now implemented Q.wiki and every second user logs in regularly.
Log-ins and Approves Pages in Q.wiki at all locations
Every month, our central service center receives around 7,000 requests for specifications on topics such as purchasing processes, human resources, finance and accounting. In the last six months alone, 1,650 new pages have been created in Q.wiki and around 700 have been approved. So our employees are actively using the system and the approval workflow is working efficiently.
These figures show us that Q.wiki is accepted and used as a central knowledge platform across all Glas Trösch sites. The outdated documents are now up to date, the written documentation is in line with the actual process execution, and the shadow documentation is continuously being cleaned up and sorted out. This is a great success!
Much less effort for certifications
Thanks to the central documentation in Q.wiki, we have come closer to another goal: simplified matrix certification. For example, we currently have around 30 audits planned in the central services. Our employees are designing and optimizing the necessary documentation on the fly, so the effort is greatly reduced and the benefits go far beyond certification.
Rapid integration of additional sites
Q.wiki is becoming our common information platform, making the knowledge of the entire group available to all employees: Both cross-location and site-specific requirements find their place here. As we are a growing company, it is a great advantage that we can easily integrate new sites into the existing management system. After implementation at the first site, we hardly need any support from Modell Aachen for the other systems. This gives us enormous flexibility as a group of companies.
By the beginning of 2023, only about two and a half years after the first sites went live, more than 40 of our sites are using Q.wiki. And more are on the way!
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