Cemex recognises the core challenge for a Mexican cement maker that has expanded rapidly across the globe through acquisitions: meshing an international network of organisations with different cultures and different areas of expertise. However, the company, which adopted e-mail as a mode of internal communication in the early 1990s, long before many other companies, is not afraid of using new technologies to enhance collaboration and raise productivity.

In 2010, Cemex turned to the latest form of collective communication—social networking technology. Its collaboration platform, named Shift, is designed to address a global workforce that is also mobile and facing increasingly complex industrial challenges—from deploying more environmentally sustainable production methods to developing ready-mix products.

The idea behind Shift—which uses tools similar to public sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia—is to bring together employees with similar challenges and objectives, wherever they are located geographically across the company, so that they can identify sources of knowledge and share expertise with an immediacy that was previously difficult to achieve.

In doing so, Cemex is radically altering the way it gets its employees to collaborate. Employees now collaborate where and when they need to, using the power of a global network to find immediate solutions to business problems. “The social element is important,” says Gilberto Garcia, director of innovation at Cemex. “Rather than introducing knowledge management in a very structured way, the social element removes the barrier to collaboration. It’s now a network that promotes social learning, and it’s a real change in the way we collaborate.”

Social networking technology has also provided a solution to knowledge management across an increasingly globally dispersed manufacturing enterprise. “The challenge has been radically changing from being a series of isolated locations to becoming a fully integrated company,” says Mr Garcia. “In the past, employees wanted to collaborate—there was just not a practical way to do it.”

As employees have discovered the benefits and ease of sharing knowledge across the network, Shift’s adoption rates have risen sharply, from about 1,000 unique visitors in the first month to more than 10,000 by June, a compounded monthly growth rate of nearly 80%. However, perhaps the most gratifying area of growth for the company has been in productivity. When solving technical problems employees receive instant, visually rich solutions from colleagues around the world. “In the past, when you raised a question about something technical, maybe in a week or month you might have received an answer,” says Mr Garcia. “Now you get dozens of answers in minutes.”

And the time taken to launch new products has come down from years to months. In its ready-mix line, for example, the global collaboration Shift facilitates made possible the launch of a new concrete product called Promptis in a record-breaking four months.