Nestlé’s 6,500+ users collaborate with Atlassian Cloud Premium

Challenge: As Nestlé grew to more than 250,000 employees and 6,500+ Atlassian users, the company wanted to improve system stability, offload maintenance, and increase user satisfaction.

Solution: Nestlé migrated to Atlassian Cloud Premium and expanded their toolset to further improve collaboration across technical and business teams.

Impact: Users are happier on Atlassian cloud. Teams are delivering more efficiently and effectively on a connected system of work, and admins are free to focus on service and innovation.

Delivering good food and a good life through great collaboration

What began as a family-owned milk company in 1866 has grown into the world’s largest food and beverage company: Nestlé. With more than 2,000 brands under the Nestlé umbrella, the company is not only focused on making good food, but also a good life for every person and pet that uses their products: from coffee lovers sipping Nescafé and Nespresso, to pups chowing down on Purina PetCare, to kids nibbling on Kit Kats, to soup fans slurping Maggi, and many more.

In recent years, many of Nestle’s brands have been evolving to deliver food with connected experiences. For example, Nespresso released a new coffee machine with a mobile app that helps customers customize their coffee. This app, along with its backend systems, are all deployed by Nestlé’s Marketing, Sales, and E-Business (MSE) Department, which includes IT and engineering. “Technology is playing a bigger and bigger role in this landscape and in the Nestlé ecosystem,” says Product Manager Kaushal Kapoor. “Nestlé doesn't want to be behind the curve. You want to be proactive and not wait for someone else in the competitive landscape to pick up the chance.”

To help plan, track, deliver, and sell industry-leading products and experiences, Nestlé has relied on Atlassian tools for more than 15 years. As the company grew to 250,000+ employees and 6,500+ Atlassian users, they opted to migrate from Atlassian Server to Atlassian Cloud Premium built on AWS Cloud to improve system stability, offload maintenance, and increase user satisfaction. Since then, MSE has been centralizing teams on Atlassian’s high-performance cloud platform to improve quality of life for employees across the business – and ultimately, for their customers.

Rising demand and usage brew up the need for a cloud migration

In 2009, one of Nestlé’s brands, Nespresso, pioneered Atlassian tools for product development and management, IT service management, knowledge management, and collaboration. Over time, Nespresso’s small instance organically grew to 2,000 users and caught MSE’s eye. “We thought Nespresso was doing things right, and we wanted to extend Atlassian to our developers,” recalls Nestlé’s Agile Toolkit Owner, Oresta Tymchyshyn.

In 2017, Nestlé followed Nespresso’s lead and adopted on-premise deployments of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket for digital product development. Once again, usage grew organically, and by 2022 more than 6,500 employees were using Atlassian tools to power their work.

Consistently high usage pushed the limits of Nestlé’s Atlassian server instance. Performance and stability started to be impacted, and MSE had to dedicate significant resources to maintenance, patching, and upgrades. Meanwhile, more and more users were asking about Atlassian cloud features. Once Nestlé saw Atlassian was all-in on cloud, they knew it was time to migrate.

The next hurdle to overcome was compliance. Nestle’s Security and Compliance Teams were hesitant about migrating in the past, but after taking a closer look at Atlassian’s advancements, their concerns subsided. “Security and Compliance became more comfortable about data protection when they saw Atlassian’s latest security standards, contract, and newer controls that were put in place,” Oresta says. “Atlassian matured as a company and became prepared to work with huge enterprises like Nestlé, so we were able to sign a contract and have a dedicated account manager and engineer. We felt confident we could trust Atlassian.”

Partnership paves the way to migration and transformation

Over the next six months, MSE migrated Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management to the cloud with help from their Solution Partner, Adaptavist.

During the migration, Nestle, Adaptavist, and Atlassian worked together to optimize along the way. “We were not just migrating. We were transforming our workflows and our processes. We were lucky to have an amazing partner: the right partner who has the right technical skills, as well as the right mindset and attitude that ‘Yes, we can do it, and we will do it in a way that will suit your future needs in the best way!'” Oresta recalls.

“Atlassian also helped a lot, from advice on how to prepare, to guiding us through the process of choosing a partner, to the whole migration," she continues. "They were the glue that connected our team, vs. just a vendor, and they always kept an eye on how we were doing.”

Savoring the successes of migration

Since completing their migration, Nestlé has accomplished all of their goals and unlocked new cloud capabilities that will take their collaboration – and products – to the next level.

Premium uptime, support, and features

Nestlé chose Atlassian Cloud Premium for its 99.95% uptime and superior support, both of which MSE has been enjoying. Operations Lead Thomas Lambert says, “We’re not coming to work wondering why Jira is slow or down.” Oresta adds, “Uptime is key for us. We also have premium support and features, like Assets [in Jira Service Management], Automation, and AI. All of this is making a difference for us and our users.”

~60% more time for service and innovation

Now that Atlassian handles all maintenance and upgrades, MSE is freed up to focus on their core competencies and innovation. “Before, we were spending 57% of our time on server maintenance, upgrades, and patches,” Oresta says. “Now my development team is really happy because they are focused on automation, solving user problems, and implementing new processes and workflows for the teams.”

90% faster onboarding and 75% faster change deployment

Many of Nestlé’s key workflows and processes are faster in the cloud. Chief Architect for Digital Technologies Vikram Venkataravana Reddy says onboarding time for engineers has also accelerated by 90%. “We now onboard developers within three days, a significant improvement from what used to take around one month, achieved by streamlining their automated onboarding processes through Jira and Confluence Cloud.”

With automated multi-environment management, developers can also test process and configuration changes more efficiently, which has reduced change deployment timelines from four weeks to one week.

Happier users

The MSE team is also excited to enhance the user experience with Atlassian cloud. “Since transitioning to the cloud, an increasing number of new users have approached us, convinced of the need for Jira in their use case. Positive feedback spreads rapidly internally when tools perform effectively,” Oresta says.

Thomas says, “Users are really happy. Our goal is to improve the product UI and make continuous front-end experience enhancements in Jira and Confluence to elevate our Net Promoter Score from 3.4 to 5.8.”

Oresta adds, “Everything is interconnected with Atlassian cloud, so you can access everything with one click and don't need to spend time searching or switching tools. That’s huge for our users.”

Better efficiency and service with Atlassian Automation, AI, Jira Service Management, and more

With Atlassian Cloud Premium, MSE unlocked access to new features and tools, including Atlassian Automation, AI, and Assets in Jira Service Management.

Atlassian Automation is already reducing user error and saving time previously spent on tedious tasks, such as user access management. “Coming to Atlassian cloud is bringing a lot of value for us. For example, we’re using Jira Service Management Cloud to capture suggestions, feedback, complaints, incidents, and requests from our users. Atlassian Automation automates most of these issues so we can automatically close them with no personnel involved. The closure rate has increased by 50%, and we have a stronger level of user satisfaction thanks to Automation,” Kaushal explains.

Nestlé is also testing other tools and cloud features, including AI (which they hope will save at least 5-10% of the time spent on content creation, summarization, and search); Statuspage; and Assets in Jira Service Management to level up their ITSM practices and reduce support requests by 30%, respectively.

Centralizing teams with a “seamless” and “smooth” system of work

While Nestle’s teams are getting value out of each Atlassian tool, unifying teams on a connected platform has made an even bigger impact. Oresta says, “In an organization of our scale, integrated tools are the key…Different tools feel like one platform with Atlassian cloud. You can access everything you need with one click and don't need to spend time searching or switching tools. That’s huge for our users.”

Thomas adds, “We have one system of work that’s seamless – even more now that we’re on the cloud. It’s easier to access and more unified, which means we have more time to spend on valuable tasks. We will be able to connect more things and more people together.”

MSE is continuing to augment their Atlassian system of work with new tools and solutions, including Compass and a collaboration solution built with Jira and Jira Service Management for marketing teams outside of IT.

Oresta says, “Compared to widely used tools, Jira Service Management is very powerful, flexible, and easy to use. That’s why teams come to us asking for it.” Thomas adds, “The goal is to bring the Atlassian ecosystem to other teams so we can have better collaboration. We have less human errors. We have less time lost looking for the right information on different platforms, and everything to be tracked correctly.”

MSE hopes that expanding Nestlé’s Atlassian toolset and centralizing teams across the business on one platform will help them stay aligned, gain visibility, and track progress toward their goals. “Unifying helps teams discover other teams. If a team is working in a silo using Jira and Confluence, they are still working in silos. It's not much of a benefit if you don't know what other teams are working on. You may be impacting other teams," Kaushal explains. "It's very important that you are working as an organization. And that's where Atlassian brings the most value: transparency and traceability.”

“We’re super happy to have migrated to Atlassian cloud”

With the migration to Atlassian Cloud Premium complete and their collaboration tools centralized, Nestlé is already reveling in their results while looking forward to what’s next.

“We're super happy to have migrated to Atlassian cloud because we see how the ecosystem can evolve from here, how we can connect many of the other apps that we still have locally or in our servers, and how we can connect more and more things to help our users,” Thomas says.

Kaushal adds, “In summarizing the overall value of migrating to Atlassian cloud for Nestlé: stability and an excellent user interface that enhances usability and boosts productivity. We anticipate productivity gains of 10-15%, and once DORA is implemented, we will have concrete data.”