Shipping company accelerates global collaboration with custom SharePoint intranet

The challenge

Outdated intranet was slowing crucial processes

In the shipping industry, speed and efficiency are paramount to customer satisfaction. To achieve these goals, staff across departments need fast access to accurate and up-to-date information. This is the use case for adopting logistics document management solutions.

However, our client was struggling with an outdated intranet that didn’t provide the speed, ease, and security it required. Some of the intranet’s drawbacks were:

• over-complex structure, making users click many times to navigate
• outdated framework causing issues with functionality, maintenance, and security
• lack of effective search functionality to find documents and media quickly
• no support for some modern document, image, and video formats

Overall, these flaws resulted in less efficient processes in the back-office and customer service. It was clear that the company needed an intranet refresh if it wanted to maintain its edge in the market.

The solution

Custom document management solution

Based on our reputation as intranet development experts, the shipping company contacted us for a solution. We proposed redeveloping the intranet in SharePoint, a highly flexible and secure platform that suited the company’s specifications.

In this project, our SharePoint customisation services provided the following features:

Company-wide

• custom client branding: fonts, colours, and sizes added according to brand guidelines
• Active Directory synchronisation with SharePoint user profiles
• intranet search centre, set up so user types (e.g. HR, training) can see the relevant content
• landing page for all staff, featuring company global news feeds
• team-relevant landing pages, secured so that users can only see the content for their country
• media library, accessible to all but with update and delete functions only accessible to selected users

Human resources

• HR home page with HR-specific search box and WebPart showing employee handbook updates
• pages for advertising internal job vacancies
• employee handbook area with country-specific content on localised pages
• e-mailing of HR audit check reminders, on an automated schedule, to relevant HR users
• area for uploading and archiving completed HR audits

Health and safety

• e-mailing of health and safety check reminders to managers on an automated schedule

Customer service

• area for customer service scripts, with a dedicated search box

Our SharePoint experts delivered this new intranet in twenty-two work days, including project management and testing prior to release.

The benefits

Boosting productivity across departments