Portals and Collaboration Success Story

Vicwest

Vicwest manufactures and markets sheet steel, steel roofing and cladding, decking, wall systems, roofing systems, liquid storage vessels and grain bins.

Challenge

Vicwest is a manufacturing company with a widely dispersed workforce. Some of the challenges they were facing included collaborating with multiple offices and plants across Canada, and providing information in both English and French. Additionally, an effective communication media was not in place within Vicwest that allows them to communicate with employees in a timely manner. It was becoming difficult for Vicwest to get synergy between these separate elements as the company continued to go through expansion, growth and evolving business practices that required employees to collaborate in cross-functional and geographically dispersed teams. Vicwest required an effective technology solution for communication, collaboration and search.

Solution

Ideaca worked with Vicwest to implement a Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007-based corporate intranet. The intranet provides executives a platform to allow organizational messages to be delivered to the entire company no matter the region, allow employees to access key HR forms and procedures online as opposed to manual paper-based processes, and gives Vicwest’s HR department one central storage area for information retrieval and collaboration. A few key items that made this solution particularly innovative and aligned to Vicwest’s specific business include:

  • Integration to 3rd party tools to support publishing of content in both English and French
  • Information access restrictions were put in place to adhere to company policies
  • Future plans to have kiosks at each plant site for workers without individual computers to access corporate intranet
  • Increased visibility and transparency into projects and improved communication, sharing and reuse of best practices and tools globally
  • Collaborative functionality for regional participation in key corporate projects

Benefits

  • Improved information flow throughout the organization by providing for consistent cross-company communication
  • Reduction in HR team’s turn-around time on document creation and approval
  • Reduction in errors due to incorrect document versions
  • Centralized information allowing for single version of the truth
  • Improved search capabilities to reduce staff time spent looking for information