SharePoint story of American Standard

Companies today have too much information and to effectively distribute it across all their employees will be a nightmare without an intranet. But again if the intranet is only going to be used to publish company news and announcements, then there's no point in having it because intranets and its purpose have taken a whole another dimension now. Very especially for a retail company like American Standard, a building and plumbing products manufacturer, it's highly critical to foster internal communication and teams' collaboration between their users who play a myriad of roles from 150 different locations. When all their 5000+ employees felt intranet-adoption to be difficult, American Standard understood that it's time for a change and went onto reinvent their intranet experience and give it a whole new meaning.

We took the first step..

By carefully analyzing their requirements, we gathered inputs from different teams including development, testing, etc. to understand their pain points. We showcased our SharePoint product with a series of sites and templates to give them the freedom of choosing what they want rather than selling what we have.

We understood that..

Their SAP-based intranet portal is a legacy application that requires intense learning and training to use the system. Training the employees on the host of functionalities was itself a tedious task while intricate design and structure of the portal further increased the complexity.

"We were very meticulous about using the SAP intranet for our business purposes but making employees get accustomed to the software was itself a big deal. Also, due to the complexities involved, employees started using simple desktop applications for their internal needs and ideally the purpose of having a corporate intranet was lost. So we wanted to move to a more modern and intuitive platform that can simplify the usability and improve adoption rates."" - American Standard, Technical Architect

Since their major focus was on improving intranet adoption together with collaboration, we concentrated more on the collaboration aspects. We gave them a product walkthrough demonstrating how collaboration can be achieved in SharePoint 2013 and created department-specific workflows that can simplify many of their internal business activities.

"We ideally wanted to create a unified workplace where all the workgroups can collaborate with another and allow content creators to self-publish relevant information on the intranet. And very particularly, we were very sure that our intranet should be a knowledge center where employees can gain access over any information without any assistance." - American Standard, Technical Architect

We proposed to migrate their existing content from the legacy SAP system to Microsoft's SharePoint 2013 with which achieving usability and collaboration should never be an issue. We recreated all their 100+ sites in SharePoint and moved their content into it making it a centralized hub to manage and store company and customer-specific information.

"Many times we talk about workspace collaboration but what have we done to achieve it is a critical question? Organizations think of extrinsic team activities or events that will definitively improve employee's bond but work collaboration cannot be achieved. The only way you can achieve employee collaboration is through SharePoint intranet portal is what I realized. When AVASOFT walked us through the SharePoint sites, we knew that this is an ideal solution that can potentially improve communication among employees and get them on speed without any issues. " - American Standard, Technical Architect

Our approach was that..

We created easy-to-use sites with easily navigable pages and included the collaboration aspect into every site. We took extra care in designing the home page and other department-specific pages to make it visually appealing and delved into their organizational structure to streamline the internal workflows. We additionally created weekly reports to calculate the productive hours of employees that made them more focused on work.

Unique offerings and business gains include..

The modern SharePoint intranet gave American Standard a whole new user interface and a refreshing experience that enabled their employees jump-started using intranet from day one without any assistance. Robust and swift features accelerated SharePoint adoption rates and achieved different work group's collaboration. Migrating all the content from 100+ sites without any data loss and redundancies saved a huge time for the client.

Light-weight SharePoint intranet is the latest trend

The intention is to create a unified workplace where employees playing different roles from various locations shouldn't feel disconnected and should contribute their thoughts and ideas to make the company a better place. Everyone should be fed with the same information and knowledge and make them more focused on work that can help American Standard create a high-performance culture and achieve customer satisfaction.

"One thing we were very certain about was that every employee should be aware of what's going on in other business units and what an intranet can offer them similar to social media apps. For example, customer-facing employees may not have continuous access to intranets but we wanted to make them feel that they are also a part of our organization and make any services/information available whenever they need it. We achieved it through SharePoint intranet and thanks to the team AVASOFT for being the reason for the change." - American Standard, Technical Architect