Overview
The client, a leading automotive industry player, faced severe collaboration challenges across divisions and departments. The problem stemmed from collaboration silos between departments, aging technology, scattered information, low application usage, and overall governance-related issues. Its severity is assumed to be of more significant proportions since the client had 24 business divisions globally and a workforce of more than 25,000.
Since the business divisions were mainly acquired as separate companies with their SharePoint setup (SP 2007, SP 2010, SP 2013, SP 2016), the client's overall global collaboration footprint exceeded 10TB of content, 34 web applications, 9000+ sites, and 10,000+ workflows and forms.
Birlasoft carved out a multiyear Global Transformation Program to enhance clients' overall user experience and collaboration, introduce uniformity in representing "a customer," and ensure the uniqueness of branding across their product lines.
- 25% increase in user productivity
- 22% increase in technology adoption
- 20% reduction in the total cost of ownership
The Challenge
Low level of employee engagement
Over the years, different divisions had been hosting applications/sites on multiple SharePoint on-premise environments, which led to challenges in maintaining uniformity across the company. The lack of uniformity meant employees worked in silos and had little to no engagement between different divisions and departments.
Difficulties in collaborating with team members
There are pitfalls in governance and collaboration due to the absence of true collaboration sites to manage and share knowledge and information, essential data, and team members' details. This problem was exacerbated by customization complexity, which heavily compromised user experience, creating hurdles even in matters as simple as getting approvals or document sharing.
Breaking down silos between the departments and maximizing productivity
Each department and division used applications specific to their environments. It led to disparate architectures, creating bottlenecks in accessing information from different departments and crowding the applications with redundant data. In addition, this meant that processes were plagued by manual interventions, hampering departments' productivity.
The Solution
Transformation Methodology
Using its proprietary Transformation Methodology, which consists of 5 Phases – Discover, Analysis, Design, Framework, and Implementation – Birlasoft's team of experts began their engagement with a two-week User Experience (UX) design workshop in the US. This was aimed at gathering pain points, setting and understanding expectations, and agreeing on common goals. The workshop emphasized the analysis and design phases, during which the team created a unique user experience for every interaction and laid out an overall collaboration roadmap.
M365 technology
Flagship products of M365 technology, such as SharePoint Online, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, and Teams, have been utilized. To increase its effectiveness and ensure continuous feedback from 30+ international stakeholders, Birlasoft used PowerApps to develop a global mobile app. Additionally, our experts used the UX workshop-driven approach to gather and set program expectations. Finally, our proprietary tools were used for as-is site assessments and migrations.
The Impact
With the help of our modern workspace and transformational framework, we modernized the client's workspace by reimagining their employee experience and tailoring it for the era of hybrid work. We build a unique persona-driven, MS Team-enabled "Modern Workplace" to enable employees to break collaboration silos and make the best use of what M365 technology offers to improve overall productivity. This allowed employees to collaborate across divisions and departments to bring out the best for the company. They can find what they need at the click of a button, with personalized content giving more insightful information to get their job done effectively.
The solution resulted in a 25% increase in user productivity, a 22% increase in technology adoption, and a 20% reduction in the total cost of ownership. Qualitative benefits include uniformity in branding, a personalized user experience, intuitive search, and improved collaboration across divisions and departments.
Customer feedback
"When we decided to move our corporate intranet from multiple old instances of SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online, we engaged Birlasoft to guide us through the transformation. From Ideation to Delivery, Birlasoft was a fantastic partner at every step. As a result, our new intranet is more attractive, more engaging, and more searchable. In addition, Birlasoft’s expertise in design, configuration, and migration was critical to realizing our vision for an improved employee experience and maximizing the value of our Microsoft Office 365 platform".
