“ Sitecore Intranet Portal allows us to integrate all these other systems so seamlessly that users think it’s all on the same system. It’s a great feature – and essential for us. „

- Birgit Fagerholt, Programme Manager, ISS Facility Services A/S

Challenge

Increasing employee loyalty to cut staff turnover

Much of ISS Facility Services’ success can be attributed to its employees. And in many ways, these are the people who do the essential jobs that aren’t always noticed – they deliver the internal mail, make sure buildings are secure and clean up at the end of the day. ISS Facility Services teams often work independently at client premises, helping keep offices, trains and hospitals clean and running smoothly. But with limited direct contact with their managers or colleagues, employees often feel it’s difficult to stay closely connected to ISS Facility Services. And this presents a problem for the company. Birgit Fagerholt, Programme Manager, explains, “We employ a massive cross-section of people, from newly arrived immigrants to students and highly-qualified managers, and maintaining loyalty among our less qualified staff can be tough. But keeping employees is a key requirement for our success: experienced staff provides a good service to our customers and we estimate that if we managed to keep each employee for one more day – we could make attractive savings.”

Increasing employee loyalty is directly related to the intranet. “The idea is to make the intranet a real benefit for our employees,” says Fagerholt. “Through the intranet we want to offer our employees a wide range of benefits, not all of them work related. On the intranet they can rent cheap summerhouses, get discount theatre tickets or book cheap hotels – they can do a whole host of things.”

An intranet that can be accessed from any computer, 24/7

ISS Facility Services’ old intranet system was built in 2003, and it was state of the art at that time. But it could no longer provide all the functionality and integration to third-party systems ISS Facility Services requires. Also, it wasn’t particularly user-friendly for content editors, and so the site was full of redundant information that made navigating it very tough.

ISS Facility Services called on DIS/PLAY (former Dansk Internet Selskab), an experienced web consultancy and longtime Sitecore solution partner, to help. Says Christian Hyllinge, Project Manager at DIS/PLAY, “ISS Facility Services has a huge number of employees and most of them don’t have company computers, so ISS Facility Services needed an intranet that could be accessed from any computer in the world. Sitecore Intranet Portal met ISS Facility Services’ business challenges and is extremely quick to get up and running. Working with Sitecore and ISS Facility Services, we managed to get the intranet ready for go live only in six weeks.” As an update to the Intranet, blue-collar workers are now able to access the Intranet without being on ISS’ Active Directory.

Solution

Create an attractive, informative intranet

ISS Facility Services had a host of other requirements: it had to be extremely stable, have built-in blog functionality, be fully customizable so each division could personalize content, be simple to navigate with a good search function, be very easy to update, and seamlessly integrate with ISS Facility Services’ other systems. Today the Intranet also has integration to news headlines and movie clips.

Sitecore’s Intranet Portal offers everything that ISS was looking for. Built on open standards, such as XML and SOAP, it easily integrates with back-end applications and has ready-to-run features, such as wikis and blogs.

It fully integrates with Microsoft Office applications and has a WYSIWYG interface, allowing content editors to easily update and customize information with limited training.

Implementation in just six weeks

The system still needed installing – which is where DIS’s and Sitecore’s experience and dedicated project management proved unbeatable. “The team was great,” explains Fagerholt. “I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted the intranet to do. I told these ideas to the team, they came back with a budget and I got what I wanted within a week.”

User-friendly and easy to update

DIS/PLAY and ISS Facility Services designed the templates and content structure together, and DIS/PLAY held workshops with the content editors. The training covered both how to use the new system and basic intranet communication skills, giving the editors everything they needed to produce excellent content.

For Fagerholt, it was very important that the editors were not only familiar with the system, but were also engaged in adding and updating content. “We didn’t have any editors in the old system. Now we have 63 – in fact, people are complaining to me because they haven’t been chosen as editors. The system is so easy to use. Editors can see exactly how their changes will look on the finished site in real-time. And it’s proving so popular that people have been asking why we don’t use the same system for our internet site.”

Result

Tailored information without downtime

Three months after launch and the site is living up to all of Fagerholt’s expectations. “The system is incredibly stable, since launch we’ve had less than 10 minutes of downtime. We wanted something that’s accessible from anywhere, at anytime, because there’s always an ISS Facility Services employee working somewhere.”

With their own home page, each division is able to tailor content specifically to users – and the division manager has the option of adding a blog. In all, the intranet contains 8,000 documents, from inspiration recipes for caterers to government guidelines on hospital cleaning. And because ISS Facility Services is focused on employee benefits, about one third of all content comes under the heading of ISS Freetime.

Ending document redundancy

To ensure that the new intranet site doesn’t suffer the same fate as the old one, each document is tied to an individual editor. When uploading the document, the editor chooses a start and end date – and that editor is sent an automatic reminder when the document is about to go out of date. As a result, there are no dead documents and all content remains relevant.

Easy and seamless integration

According to Hyllinge, “One of the beauties of Sitecore Intranet Portal is that it’s probably more compliant with Microsoft products than Microsoft itself.”

While this may be invisible to users, it’s an essential part of running a comprehensive intranet. ISS Facility Services’ intranet seamlessly links to Microsoft Active Directory.

It displays jobs from ISS Facility Services’ partner, StepStone. And users can book summer houses and theatre tickets on third-party systems without leaving the intranet.

Fagerholt says, “Sitecore Intranet Portal allows us to integrate all these other systems so seamlessly that users think it’s all on the same system. It’s a great feature – and essential for us.”

Technical Description

Site Special Ingredients:

• An out-of-the-box blog means each division manager can communicate directly to their employees
• WYSIWYG editor ensures content editors need almost no training
• 24/7 availability anywhere in the world
• Integration with Active Directory software and third-party sites