Nutrien Procurement Transformation

Following the merger of Agrium and PotashCorp, Nutrien became the world's largest provider of crop inputs, services and solutions; but behind that headline, more than 20,000 employees across three legacy organizations were being asked to change how they work, all at once.

The mandate was to align Agrium, Crop Production Services, and PotashCorp onto a single suite of policies an technologies, and deliver the savings promised to investors. The new ecosystem included Ariba, Amazon Business, SAP S/4HANA, and a new Card and Expense Management system, all rolling out to a workforce that was still learning how to be one company.

Employees were overwhelmed, uncertain, and deeply distributed. Information lived across more than 50 decentralized SharePoint sites: duplicated, outdated, and hard to find. The organization was under pressure to move fast, which made it harder to justify the time required for meaningful user research.

Through retros on past change management efforts, interviews and persona workshops we understood why change management for a freshly merged organization of over 23,000 employees wouldn’t be easy.

• Employees were experiencing information overload through the constant communication of changing policies, procedures and resources.
• Communications were often lost on employees as they acknowledged a lack of a single source for training and support.
• End-users did not see how they benefited from change and how their compliance fit into the larger value proposition.
• Messaging across regions was inconsistent and varied.
• In Retail specifically, there was a general mistrust of communications coming from “Corporate”.
• Employees expressed varying levels of digital literacy and learning preferences.

Combining design thinking principles with traditional change management methods, we identified cross-platform personas, communication channels, and methods to ensure communication assets designed, developed and delivered were informed by users — achieving buy-in from the ground up. Following a prototyping and testing phase, the feedback from users allowed our team to confidently build print and digital assets, communication materials and a full brand extension for multiple system rollouts. Assets included:

• Email communications & template design
• Training video production & delivery
• Custom SAP / Ariba interface design
• Placemat, booklet and slide deck design & development
• Nutrien Ariba persona creation
• Custom SAP / Ariba interface design & development
• SmartBuy brand development, guidelines & asset library.