Connect Case Studies

The Ascott

alessia.zuccarello@cocentric.com (Alessia Zuccarello) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:15:30 GMT

Client Background and Context

The Ascott is one of the world's largest serviced residence and hotel operators, with a portfolio spanning more than 190 cities globally. Its UK and French operations employ around 800 people, the majority in frontline, shift-based roles, moving between properties, rarely at a desk.

Getting important information to those employees had always been difficult. Shift workers on nights missed updates sent during the day. Day workers missed things that went out in the evening. Different teams used different channels: some relied on WhatsApp, some on email, some on nothing formal at all. There was no single place where everyone could be reached.

There was also a compliance risk sitting in the background. A significant portion of the workforce had been accessing The Ascott's workplace tools and platforms through personal email addresses. That arrangement worked day to day, but it raised questions about data ownership, GDPR compliance, and what happened to access when someone left.

When Meta announced that Workplace would be sunset, The Ascott needed to move to a new platform. That decision made the access problem impossible to ignore. The goal was to give every employee a secure way into Workvivo without relying on email addresses.

Gleneagles

alessia.zuccarello@cocentric.com (Alessia Zuccarello) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:52:04 GMT

Client Background and Context

Gleneagles Group operates four premium hospitality brands, each with its own identity, its own properties and its own HR system. The four brands run across three separate Sona instances and one Fourth environment.

That independence is part of what makes the group work. But when it came to connecting thousands of frontline employees to Blink, the group's communications platform, that fragmentation was a problem.

Most of the workforce is frontline. Staff work across multiple locations, often without corporate email or regular access to a desk. Getting them onto Blink meant pulling employee data from four different systems, creating a verified identity for each person, and getting them into the platform quickly.

Before Connect, none of that was automated. Joiners, movers and leavers each required manual work across multiple systems. There was no shared view of who was employed across the group, and no consistent way to manage access when things changed.

Ennismore

alessia.zuccarello@cocentric.com (Alessia Zuccarello) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:28:27 GMT

Client Background and Context

Ennismore operates 18 hotel brands and more than 50 restaurant brands across 250+ locations worldwide. Each brand runs its own identity, its own systems and its own way of managing people. That operational independence is key to their rapid expansion across the world.

But behind the scenes, it had created real gaps. More than 70% of the workforce had no Microsoft account, no corporate email and no reliable access to the tools the group was investing in. HR data lived in different systems, recorded in different formats. There was no single view of the workforce that anyone at group level could actually rely on.

When Ennismore began preparing to roll out The Lobby as its communications platform and Ennismore Learning more broadly, the identity problem could no longer sit in the background. Every employee needed access. Getting there meant building a system that would give them one identity, one process and one reliable source of truth for every person who worked for Ennismore.

Finsbury Foods

alessia.zuccarello@cocentric.com (Alessia Zuccarello) — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 09:14:53 GMT

Client Background and Context

Finsbury Food Group is one of the UK's leading bakery manufacturers, with 3,000 employees spread across production sites and offices. The majority work in production or logistics, which means most of the workforce does not sit at a desk and does not have a corporate email account.

When the business decided to roll out Workvivo as its company-wide communications platform, it faced a practical question straight away: how do you get 3,000 employees onto a platform when most of them cannot receive an activation email?

The existing approach was manual. Someone had to check Dayforce, the company's HR system, and then separately set up access in Workvivo. For a business the size of Finsbury, that was slow, prone to error, and simply not built for scale.

Beyond the rollout itself, there were ongoing problems to solve. When a new employee joined and was added to Dayforce, there was no automatic trigger to give them access to anything else. When someone left, removing their access required a separate manual step that was not always caught in time. When someone moved between sites or changed roles, their access often did not update to reflect the change.

Finsbury needed an identity and access layer that could do what its existing tools could not: connect Dayforce to Workvivo automatically, handle every type of employee, and keep running reliably in the background without someone checking it every week.

Fagerhult Group

alessia.zuccarello@cocentric.com (Alessia Zuccarello) — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 08:09:32 GMT

Client Background and Context

Fagerhult Group is a global lighting and technology company made up of 16 independently operated brands. Each brand runs its own IT and HR environment. That independence is part of the group’s operating model and commercial strength.

But independence at scale comes at a cost.

Across the group, there were 12 separate Microsoft Entra ID tenants and HR data spread across multiple systems and CSV feeds. The workforce was split between desk-based employees with M365 accounts and deskless workers without them. There was no consistent way in, and it was clear that no one had a complete view of who needed access to what, or whether that access was current.

And when Fagerhult began planning the rollout of Workvivo as a shared communications platform across all 16 brands, the identity problem could no longer sit in the background. Every employee needed access. Not just desk-based employees, every single one of the 4,000 people across the group, regardless of brand, role or how they work.

The goal was clear. Provide secure, consistent access for every employee without forcing brands to change their existing infrastructure.