How Ortis turned sixty years of plant expertise into something 125 people can actually use

Sixty years of expertise, and no way to pass it on

Ortis Laboratories has spent six decades developing plant-based health supplements. Its edge is depth: ingredients, regulation, markets, science. In a specialised industry, that expertise is the company. It was also the thing hardest to reach.

• The knowledge that made Ortis competitive was not circulating. Market intelligence, product insights, client information and regulatory updates each sat somewhere different, held by someone different.
• Nothing connected what the team collectively knew. There was no system for spreading it, so knowledge moved by conversation or not at all.
• Two different needs went unmet at once. The explicit one, where a person needs a specific document. And the tacit one, where a person needs to understand a market or a client situation and does not know who to ask.
• Finding the expert was as hard as finding the file. In a company of 125, the person with the answer is usually two desks away and completely invisible.

Make sharing the easy option, not the virtuous one

Ortis wanted a platform people would use without being told to. That put the emphasis on access and retrieval rather than on process, and on a few capabilities that decided the choice.

• Important content stays visible. Relevant, up-to-date material is highlighted rather than left to sink under everything published since, which is how most bases quietly stop being read.
• Search is reliable, not hit-or-miss. The search engine combined with tags and automatic filters turned "find the document" from a hopeful exercise into a predictable one.
• Teams build their own spaces and tabs. Regulatory watch, communication campaigns, analyses, meeting minutes, safety sheets: each gets set up quickly, so the platform matches how different teams actually work.
• Four spaces carry four distinct jobs. The training room handles onboarding and development. The experts corner holds competitive intelligence, organised by topic to pull people into collaboration across projects. The library collects curated articles on health, marketing, safety and other professional interests. Supply spaces track the supply chain, from supplier price trends to ingredients intelligence.

People stopped waiting for information to arrive

The first gain is time. Collaborators find key content and locate internal experts faster, so the hours previously lost to searching go back into the work.

The second is behavioural, and it matters more. Access to each other's knowledge accelerated skill development, and people became proactive: they go looking for information rather than waiting for it to be sent to them.

The third reaches the customer. Richer access to the products and the science behind them deepened business understanding across the company, which shows up directly in how credible client-facing conversations are.

Ortis is also honest about the cost. A platform creates the conditions for sharing; it does not create the behaviour. Adoption took sustained communication, and the knowledge management team kept at it.

Establishing such a system, including the necessary changes in working methods, is not always easy. The barriers indeed exist and the Knowledge Management team must constantly communicate and disseminate good practices and benefits. All this is only the reflection of a beautiful adventure where the human remains happily in the center of the journey, with its ups and downs!

The real change at Ortis is not on the platform. It is that 125 people now go looking for what a colleague knows, and expect to find both the document and the person.