Valued applications include:

·         Employee directory - allows users to hover their mouse over employee names to see small photos of the individual (useful for new contacts or new staff). The directory also integrates with holiday forms allowing users to see if staff are at work – or at play. Alternatively, users can search out staff by department name or navigating through management links.

·         Online Purchasing - a 5-step wizard integrated to the HR database which immediately determines types of purchasing allowed and the required line management workflow for the purchasing value. When workflow is complete the user only has to click a link that automatically generates a dynamic PDF of the purchase order.  

·         Sales Proposal Builder – An online application for quickly assembling sales proposals with centrally managed content fragments that are chosen for inclusion by point and click. The online tool dynamically generates the proposal in MS-Word.

·         Information Management System - a centrally managed resource about data contracts, communication with suppliers (emails and minutes to meetings/phone calls), the status of the relationship, historical information currently handed down by word of mouth, and actions for the future, including additions to the contract.

·         Holiday Forms - Allows all staff to manage their holiday schedule with reporting and workflow to line management and HR.

·         Online Expenses – replacing traditional paper forms process with an identified 4-man day saving for Finance alone.

·         Project Schedules – promotes and details company projects with information on ROI, stakeholders, links, milestones and updates.

·        Role-specific Portals – three portals designed for specific company roles: home (for all employees), sales and technical services. Each portal is built of smaller “portlet fragments.”

·         Competitor Database - a content-managed searchable resource for all competitor product and market information.

·         Product Bible - a content-managed searchable resource for all QAS product literature and collateral.

Measured benefits

While awards are nice to receive, the QAS intranet has received more than just kudos – it is delivering measured results and value for the business. Some of the benefits include:

·         Measured return on investment (ROI)

·         Improved line management decision making (e.g. holiday and purchase forms)

·         Increased sales opportunities fomented by better sales collaboration and cross-selling

·         Improved employee communications and collaboration

·         Enhanced levels of customer service

Despite the move away from the Stellent CMS as the underlying platform (but preserving the CMS as the content management system), the new J2EE platform has even wowed Stellent. “Stellent have cited the QAS intranet as the best intranet implementation they have seen with or without Stellent,” says Crossley.

Costs savings achieved:

·         Online Expenses – saved four person days per month.

·         Finance savings - online workflow has reduced administrative processing time from two weeks to one day.

·         Purchase Ordering - saved four person days per month and an ROI savings of US$20,000 per year

·         Sales Proposal Builder – streamlined proposal and sales process saves almost US $25,000 per year

·         Intranet Use - 115% increase in usage of the intranet (infers a yet to be measured productivity gain).

Competitor Database and Product Bible are 2 examples of CMS managed resources that enhance the capability of Sales staff. Competitor Database details competitor products and market position. This enables the Sales force to be much more effective in a sale by positioning QAS products appropriately. Product Bible is a vast resouce of QAS product detail (pricing, manuals, implementations, data) allowing Sales staff to be more knowledgable and quick about what and how to sell.

CMS workflow enables pre-validation of whether information is useful to the business, e.g Technical Notes written by the Technical Support Team needs to be previewed as it is published to the external customer facing internet knowledge base as well as the intranet.

Problems overcome

“The whole intranet project features a seamless user interface with all applications neatly integrated as well as CMS functions,” says Crossley.

The cultural benefits of a strong intranet cannot be understated. Culture and community is the backbone of a happy workplace that drives employee satisfaction, which has a direct corollary to customer satisfaction.

“A lack of community was solved with the intranet which can be used as a broadcasting hub for news, local and social events and for sales ads,” adds Crossley. “On special dates such as Halloween or Christmas, new “skins” are applied to the intranet to make staff feel festive. A new feature soon will automatically detect staff birthdays via the HR database and apply a birthday skin for those individuals.”

Staff can also have an “avatar” picture in the top left of their intranet window to personalize their home page.

“The message that the intranet belongs to the people of QAS has really gained momentum as staff see others taking advantage of its features,” says architect Crossley, gushing with pride; and for good reason. “This has engendered a culture of opportunity and creativity in staff questioning whether they can leverage the intranet for themselves or their department to make savings.”

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QAS intranet case study – anatomy of a winner

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media