Client story Driving Productivity: Mānuka Health Adopts Microsoft 365 Copilot with Insight

Facts at a glance

Client industry

Retail

Challenge

Mānuka Health, a global supplier of honey and wellness products, aimed to enhance productivity and employee experience by deploying M365 Copilot. They faced challenges in ensuring widespread adoption, effective use, and data security compliance, particularly with GDPR.

Solution

Mānuka Health partnered with Insight for a comprehensive Copilot adoption strategy. Insight's Copilot Adoption Workshops provided tailored training, starting with the executive team to drive enthusiasm. They also secured the Microsoft 365 environment, ensuring data protection and compliance, and shared best practices for using Copilot in Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint.

Results

• Enhanced productivity and efficiency across the business
• Widespread adoption driven by executive enthusiasm
• Secure environment ensuring data protection and GDPR compliance
• Plans to expand Copilot usage to other functions and integrate with Dynamics 365

Area of expertise

Insight's Generative AI solutions personalise customer conversations with human-like responses and contextual awareness.

Download the client story

From its beginnings as a small-town honey producer in New Zealand, Mānuka Health has evolved into a global supplier of honey and related wellness products. Like other enterprises, Mānuka Health understands AI’s potential to drive efficiency and productivity across the business, but it also sees the technology as a powerful tool for improving the employee experience.

"We want to bring automation into the business and achieve efficiencies wherever we can. But we also know AI can simplify the work lives of our people by removing or reducing mundane activities, giving them more time to focus on more rewarding and productive tasks."

Vaughan Greer, Global Projects and IT Operations Manager at Mānuka Health

As a Microsoft 365 E5 enterprise customer, Mānuka Health saw the opportunity to leverage its investment by deploying M365 Copilot across the business. However, introducing a generative AI-powered assistant is not as straightforward as deploying a new application for a specific purpose. Success is determined by how many people adopt the AI assistant, how often they use the tool, and how they use it to improve their productivity and effectiveness. Copilot, for example, can do a huge variety of tasks, ranging from rewriting a draft in Word to creating instant data visualisations in Excel. Recognising M365 Copilot’s broad utility value, Mānuka Health realised training was essential in accelerating adoption and return on investment. Focusing on training its workforce to use Copilot with Microsoft 365’s productivity applications, the company considered offers from multiple vendors. It chose Insight’s Copilot Adoption Workshops. 

"We chose Insight’s training package largely due to our strong, long-term working relationship with them. They look after everything from Microsoft licensing to working with our ICT team to secure our environment for Copilot"

Vaughan Greer, Global Projects and IT Operations Manager at Mānuka Health

According to Microsoft and LinkedIn’s 2024 Work Trend Index, 78% of employees ‘bring their own AI’ to work. Mānuka Health had noticed the trend and was concerned about the security of data being used in third-party generative AI apps in the cloud. 

The company knew the risks of leaked intellectual property (IP), customer information and other sensitive data. With operations around the globe, it also needed to ensure it continued to comply with privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). 

“We were particularly concerned about the use of one popular cloud-based AI tool and its impact on the security of our IP and other data. We also have offices in Europe, so GDPR compliance is a must. Deploying M365 Copilot was an important step in securing our data, but we also knew we had to secure the environment and promote Copilot best practices.”  
Vaughan Greer, Global Projects and IT Operations Manager at Mānuka Health

Mānuka Health realised that by leveraging Copilot to standardise its AI-powered productivity needs, it could mitigate the risk of data leaks and breaches. To this end, it turned to Insight to work with its ICT team to secure its Microsoft 365 environment before deploying M365 Copilot. In addition, Insight’s Copilot Adoption Workshops included guidance on best practices and security to help ensure sensitive data is protected.  The training began with Mānuka Health’s executive team to help drive adoption across the organisation.  

"We knew that if our executives got excited about M365 Copilot, their enthusiasm would trickle down to their teams. And thanks to Insight’s workshops, our executives not only improved their own productivity, but they also got a much better idea of Copilot’s potential. There’s now a real hunger to roll out Copilot to as many people as possible across the organisation."

Vaughan Greer, Global Projects and IT Operations Manager at Mānuka Health

Looking ahead, Mānuka Health plans to roll out Copilot across the organisation. To this end, Insight has created a dedicated Microsoft Teams channel for ongoing M365 Copilot training, including training material that can be readily used or customised to meet the company’s future needs. The company is now considering Copilots for other functions, such as automating coding tasks for the development team. Mānuka Health’s core enterprise resource planning system, Dynamics 365, offers further scope for automating tedious tasks like manual data entry, content generation and notetaking across sales, service, marketing, operations and supply chain functions. As the Work Trend Index shows, most employees want to use AI at work. As an organisation that is embracing AI, Mānuka Health likely to attract high-achieving workers. 

"We see the training sessions as a way to ignite excitement in AI. So, as people exchange ideas and talk about how Copilot has helped them, these experiences are passed on to others. That has a positive flow-on effect across the organisation. We’re really only just starting to realise Copilot’s potential. "

Vaughan Greer, Global Projects and IT Operations Manager at Mānuka Health

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