Helping a Century Old Global Manufacturer Overcome Communication Barriers With Digital Workspace

The client was looking for means to improve employee engagement, knowledge management, document management and information search capabilities within the departments. They wanted a connected workspace where employees could engage and communicate with each other, thereby improve productivity and aid problem solving. we helped bring in the engagement and communication with the help of SharePoint and Intranet solutions.

Being a large industrial player, the segregated means of communication resulted in a disconnected workspace, leading to low productivity, time consumption, and communication gaps. The client was looking for a comprehensive tool to manage collaboration and internal documents as well to aid problem solving. With this broad vision, they sought improvement in the organization’s path of knowledge & document management, the document’s search capability and tying all of them together to enhance employee engagement. In order to achieve the aforementioned goals, the client was looking for a solution that will bridge the gap between the company stakeholders. For this, the solution should have knowledge sharing capability as well as reduce data & operational redundancy and delivery time while ensuring global scalability.

We helped the client centralize their digital workspace with the help of Intranet, with a vision to build a more collaborative environment for the employees, departments and management. In order to capture the requirements of the client, we undertook a step-by-step approach, right from planning to mockup to the final launch. The intranet solution first started off as a series of click-through UX mocks that allowed all stakeholders across departments to understand and sign-off on the final user experience. The system was implemented using SharePoint Online with extensive SharePoint security features. This new intranet portal developed comprised of a new Home Page, Social Features and Knowledge Repository. The Home Page is a central platform that displayed all links, sections like FAQs, gallery, reference documents and much more that helped bring in more engagement among the users. It also allowed communication among employees & management and get more done via post messages, timelines, polls and much more. Furthermore, to employee engagement, the Social Features help break the formal code of communication and encouraged a positive culture of encouragement and acknowledgement of achievements. Tools like Yammer further bolstered this engagement and collaboration among employees as well as the management team. Leveraging the SharePoint document management feature, our team designed a Knowledge Management System for the client to maintain a common location/storage for the users to upload their documents and share it with other users in the organization. The custom module enabled users to add metadata to the file and advanced search capability for searching files based on the metadata keywords. The users now had access to information in a tree view whereby simply clicking on the folder of choice, the contents would surface, thus saving time and improving efficacy. The Enterprise Intranet was integrated with their BPM suite that worked efficiently on Android as well as iOS and reduced the hassle of switching to multiple tools. SharePoint Designer workflows were used to send notifications and reminders that made communication effective.