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Intranet Case Study
Sorce provides invaluable business systems integration
Knights Brown uses its experience and drive to deliver an innovative, competitive and sustainable construction service.
As a leading, regional construction and civil engineering contractor, they take time to understand their customers’ needs so that they can deliver to the high standards they expect, on time and within budget.
With offices in Hampshire, Kent and South Wales, their extensive in-house resources include a comprehensive fleet of company-owned plant. Above all else though, their people are their greatest asset.
Location:
UK
Industry:
Construction
Employees:
250
Location:
UK
Industry:
Construction
Employees:
250
The challenge
To deliver an intranet that would integrate with existing business systems, providing an integrated approach to business data and information.
To bring together employees from all areas of the organisation in one central location, with remote access being essential due to the high number of site workers.
Looking to create a Knights Brown community where everyone feels part of the organisation regardless of location or role and improve communication, knowledge sharing and collaboration.
The solution
The journey leading to the launch of the new site was fast paced, taking just four months to reach go-live. Prior to the introduction of Engage, teams were struggling to find relevant information on current construction projects. At any one time, there can be up to 40 live projects. It is vital that employees can access project details, contact and location information quickly and easily.
Integration between Engage and their Project Information Management System (PIMS) has hugely improved the accessibility of project information for everyone. ‘Find a site’ is accessed using the Quicklink application on the Engage homepage. Information can now be searched for in a few different ways; projects can easily be found even if you have little prior knowledge to help you search.
“We were keen to develop and launch our Engage intranet as quickly as possible and Sorce accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. As a result, we were able to proceed from start-up meeting to launch in just four months.”
Kate Cusack
Communications Manager
The Health and Safety team are hugely benefitting from ‘find a site’. They are required to visit construction sites on a regular basis; they are now just a few clicks away from all the information they need including contact details of their colleagues complete with photographs and even have a Google map view of each site to prepare for their visit.
The Accounts department are also saving lots of time by using ‘find a site’ to search for the correct contacts at different construction sites for invoicing queries.
Leave management is also an area that has been improved following integration between Engage and their PIMS. All employees across the organisation can now easily access a summary of their own annual leave record and if applicable they can also access approved annual leave for others within their team. This information was not previously displayed well and it was hard to access. Booking or reviewing current annual leave and historical information was laborious and not user friendly.
As with all companies within the Construction industry Knights Brown complete many prequalification questionnaires as part of the preliminary stages of the new project bidding process. Within Engage they have created a page dedicated to their bid writing team. Within this dedicated area, they store any information that will help the team to complete a prequalification questionnaire.
At a glance, they can see their most recently viewed documents, access FAQ’s specific to bid writing, find the latest images for using to illustrate bids and they even have their own microblog for sharing ideas.
The ability to manage version control for documents has also proved to be invaluable. This team didn’t previously have anywhere to share ideas and were unable to quickly access information that was frequently used; they have seen an increase in efficiency and have saved lots of time.
Dedicated Human Resources and Health and Wellbeing pages are helping to reinforce the Knights Brown initiative to make the company a great place to work. The pages provide a central location to store documents, policies and links to external websites that all serve to enhance the skills, knowledge and wellbeing of employees regardless of role or location.
Previous corporate communications have taken the form of a printed quarterly company magazine and electronic monthly newsletters sent via email to everyone in the organisation. Statistics showed that at time only 40 percent of employees were reading the emails.
Engage is providing Knights Brown with a central location for sharing information and news. Employees are now able to quickly and easily access content.
Going forwards future integration with a new Enterprise Report Planning system is on the horizon. They are planning to be a self-sufficient, taking on this integration work themselves with little involvement from Sorce.
The result
Engage is a fresh, modern and dynamic intranet with lots of character and its own identity. The integration between Engage and other business systems has proved to be invaluable. Efficiency and productivity has increased.
Engage has become a window to other systems within the organisation, creating a one stop shop for business information and data.
A huge improvement in communication has been seen; employees from all areas across the organisation have been brought together in one central community to share knowledge and collaborate.
“Engage now acts as the first port of call for all company news and announcements and provides a platform for information sharing and collaboration that we haven’t had before. Working with Sorce made it easy for us to achieve our objectives.
This is one of the brilliant benefits of the integration capability within Engage. Teams such as Health and Safety, Accounts and Information Technology are accessing information quickly and easily, in an intuitive and user friendly way, saving time and increasing efficiency.”
Kate Cusack
Communications Manager
