We’re excited to announce that our client Acuity Brands was awarded honorable mention for their recent intranet redesign! Ragan Communications presented Acuity Brands with an honorable mention in the “Intranet Usability” category of their annual Intranet Awards.
Check out the story below for how we helped Acuity create a modern intranet with Rise.
Background
When you’re starting with a legacy intranet that has minimal user adoption, the only place to go is up. Acuity Brands, one of the world’s leading providers of LED lighting, lighting controls, and related products and services, needed to improve communication and collaboration in its HR and corporate communications departments. Its existing intranet, however, was a series of legacy SharePoint versions that were not integrated and unable to provide the level of user experience that Acuity Brands desired. There was not one consolidated place to publish information and collaborate due to the different versions, and a central repository for knowledge sharing was nonexistent. Thanks to the legacy processes of sharing and accessing information via static links, usability was extremely painful.
Goals
Acuity Brands wanted an intranet that was current, engaging, and most importantly – easy to use. Publishing articles and sharing news announcements needed to be a simple process that did not require IT assistance so that content administration could be handled by non-technical users. Acuity Brands wanted an intranet that could provide a consistent user experience through template pages, branding, and navigation. In addition, they wanted an intranet that was mobile-friendly so its distributed workforce could access the intranet on the go from mobile devices. They also required an automated process for publishing and sharing to replace their existing process of manual copy and paste.
Strategy
After working with Perficient on a Yammer migration to improve employee collaboration across teams, the Acuity Brands team turned its sights on updating its SharePoint intranet. Wanting to stick with SharePoint but update their version and move to the cloud to simplify administration and improve functionality, Acuity Brands selected SharePoint Online for their intranet platform. They engaged with Perficient and took advantage of Rise, Perficient’s Intranet-as-a-Service solution.
During the selection process, Acuity Brands and Perficient identified that Rise could meet the goals outlined by Acuity Brands right out of the box, which greatly increased the speed of implementation. Acuity Brands wanted the new intranet up and running fast in order to start engaging end users immediately, and Perficient worked with Acuity Brands through a two-week engagement to define the information architecture, branding, navigation, and templates. From there, Acuity Brands developed the remaining content and prepared for launch – delivering the new intranet in record time.
Results
Acuity Brands’ new intranet is a hit with employees. With more than 1,500 employees accessing it monthly, user adoption is up 25% and growing. Since the intranet is now mobile-responsive, Acuity Brands has seen the level of mobile usage increase dramatically, and now on-the-go employees can have the same user experience as those in the office.
Rise provided both a stable and familiar environment, and the lighting manufacturer was up and running ahead of schedule – saving the company both time and money and providing collaboration, corporate communications, and other resources to its 2,800 employees with access to this system.
Acuity Brands Awarded Honorable Mention for Intranet Usability
by Jane Louis on March 15th, 2017 | ~ minute read
