Case study: MICROSOFT

SharePoint Intranet Solution: Connecting Field-Based and On-Site Employees

Case Study at a Glance

CLIENT

Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD)

THE PROBLEM

NEORSD wanted to improve communication and collaboration between employees in the field and their onsite counterparts.

THE VERTEX SOLUTION

We built an SharePoint intranet solution on NEORSD’s O365 tenant that became a central point of engagement for the entire distributed employee base including HR, Benefits, Marketing, Community Engagement, IT and other departments.

THE RESULT

The intranet empowers departments with the ability to update and maintain their own content. Plus, employees can personalize their home pages with content that best meets their needs. All employees can obtain the forms and information they need, whenever needed from any device. Field employees have easy access to community engagement information. The easy-to-use system was enthusiastically embraced by the organization. Communication has improved, which has increased internal efficiencies.

How NEORSD Connected its Field-Based Employees with the Onsite Organization, Improved Communication, and Expedited HR Procedures

Problem & Background

Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District (NEORSD) is one of the largest wastewater treatment facilities in Ohio, processing tens of billions of gallons of wastewater every year. This distributed organization employs about 1,000 employees across a corporate headquarters and three engineering and processing plants throughout the city.

NEORSD had been suffering from a lack of a centralized portal that connected everyone. Field-based personnel and employees at the engineering facilities were seldom in front of their computers. Consequently, they were excluded from corporate-level happenings and were not knowledgeable of how NEORSD was executing its mission.

NEOSORD is a community-based organization that emphasizes educating and building awareness of water conservation and green initiatives. Community engagement could be made effective only if all the employees of NEORSD had a chance to participate in these missions. Field employees needed to be plugged into various community engagements.

Vertex Solution: An easily accessible intranet that empowers and engages

Vertex developed an intranet for NEORSD on its O365 tenant to empower employees with practical information accessible anytime from any device. Vertex worked with the Communications and Marketing departments to develop its intranet with clear objectives:

Easy accessibility from desktop and mobile devices – We adopted a tile-based design so that field-level employees could easily get to their content.
Personalization – All employees can personalize their home pages with their palette of tiles so that their frequently accessed content is within reach.
Drive high adoption – We wanted the intranet to be the go-to page for employees to interact with corporate functions. We provided easy access to the most commonly used forms and procedures documents. One of the tiles provides instant access to universally retrieved forms (HR, Benefits, Payroll etc.) with just one touch.
Easy updating of content – The design ensured that each department could oversee its own content and update its departmental pages without any help from IT.
Centralized calendar – We created a custom internal and external calendar that is available on the home page to provide visibility to corporate and community engagements across the organization.