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Outdated intranet was slowing crucial processes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However, our client was struggling with an outdated intranet that didn’t provide the speed, ease, and security it required.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• outdated framework causing issues with functionality, maintenance, and security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

Logistics company gains timely business intelligence through data warehouse migration

The challenge

Data warehouse performance was hindering BI

At the time of this project, our client’s business intelligence team worked with data from an on-premises data warehouse. While the data warehouse was set up correctly, it simply didn’t have the capacity to handle the client’s data volumes. As a result, the data warehouse was not providing the data needed for business intelligence in a timely manner.

 

First of all, this delay in BI data affected the company’s own financial reporting capability. The company’s management did not have access to the up-to-date financial insights they needed to steer the business effectively.

 

Secondly, the poor data warehouse performance also affected a BI service that the company provided for its customers. This meant that the BI platform, which customers used to track their subscription sales, was not meeting customers’ expectations. And this resulted in customers calling our client’s BI team for IT support, which added to the team’s workload.

 

Finally, the company had plans to onboard new customers — but expanding the data warehouse was prohibitively expensive. It was clear that a high-performing and scalable alternative was required.

 

Overall, the drawbacks of this poorly performing BI data warehouse were:

 

• decreased ability to produce timely financial reports
• reduced customer satisfaction from BI services
• increased time spent on customer service calls
• lack of scalability needed to take on new customers

The solution

Cloud-based BI data warehouse integration

Based on our reputation as integration experts, the company contacted egforit Software to solve its data warehouse issues. Our in-depth analysis pointed to two potential solutions:

 

1. Migrating the data warehouse and BI software to a scalable cloud platform
2. Carrying out a performance tune-up on the on-premises data warehouse

 

Because the data warehouse’s problem was scale rather than configuration, we did not expect a tune-up to make much improvement. For this reason, and because staying on-premises would not solve the scalability issue, we recommended moving to the cloud.

 

The client accepted our proposal to migrate the data warehouse to Microsoft Azure, a highly scalable and cost-effective platform. Following this we achieved SAP BusinessObjects data integration with the data warehouse, bringing the whole BI system into the cloud.

The benefits

Future-proof business intelligence

Guiding Europe’s busiest port to CMS modernisation

When a Egypt , middle east port faced uncertainty on how to modernise its outdated SharePoint platform, luckily our consultants stepped in with migration expertise.