Blueprint 365 implemented a SharePoint Intranet on Microsoft 365 to automate processes, facilitate collaboration and document management while meeting the organizational ISO compliance requirements. 

Discovery

Blueprint 365 provided discovery meetings/interviews with the department leads prior to starting the project.

Deliverables were drafted and approved along with a statement of work.

Business Needs

It was important to the organization to keep its ISO certificate. A concise Change Management System was to be migrated and later streamlined into a less manual process. Instead of the QMS manager manually adding controlled numbers to document footers, a calculated column was created for each document as metadata in the library. This reduced the effort and time taken to make process changes. 

Old: edits were requested in a list by process owners and upon gaining approval, a QMS manager was assigned to manually update the file with approved changes.

New: Edits to policies were made in Word online with tracked changes and approvals were gained using workflows. Once approved, the file was published as a major version, converted to a PDF and pushed out to a public facing library.

Building automated processes for Claims, Incident Logs and Corrective Action were also implemented and were key to the project’s success.

A pain point was addressed for staff ordering products from a Grade Catalog. Just one digit or letter off on the ordering number caused an incorrect delivery. To address this, Blueprint 365 built a failsafe SharePoint list with calculated columns for employees to use when placing orders. 

Employees can now input the various measurements from choice columns, such as weight, thickness, length etc. to output the correct product key for their orders. This was very exciting for the Quality Manager as it led to reducing risk, thus increasing efficiency and reducing loss. 

The organization moved to Microsoft 365 from a legacy SharePoint 2010 on premises server. They chose to implement a zero-server footprint which was previously maintained by a third-party MSP. With offices in North and South America, they can now depend on the newest features and dependable access. Towards the end of the project their 2010 server was attacked by a virus but thankfully their data was safe and sound in the Cloud already.

Blueprint 365 was charged with migrating files from the on prem 2010 SharePoint. Versions and metadata were brought over to comply with future audits.

The lists and libraries that Blueprint 365 migrated were not using content types and the lookups for common tags lived in multiple locations and were out of sync. Blueprint 365 did a clean-up post migration to get all the Clients and Customers from multiple looks ups into one master lookup. This was added to the site content type hub so all site collections could look to one location. Master lists were created in both Spanish and English. Training was provided to the client, so they knew how to properly architect structure in SharePoint to optimize search and reduce redundancy. 

Challenges:

Security

The organization is made up of several companies. Each division with its own employees who needed a place for collaboration and document management.  Company sites were built in a flat architecture. One root site landing page allowed employees to pick their company and be directed to the relevant site.

Some common information such as Employee directory Academy and Search were shared resources among the companies. Adjusting security on these sites was done to make sure everyone had a seamless navigation from their own siloed site collection but could not access a company site that they shouldn’t be allowed to see.

Navigation

There were multiple roles that could access all sites and all companies so planning a well thought out navigation was pivotal to making collaboration and communication efficient. 

Language

Two thirds of employees are Spanish speaking only. We created a site collection in Spanish for their South America divisions which proved a challenge for some of our developers well versed in SharePoint but not so much in Spanish. However, the client was gracious to provide us with some correct translations as needed. It really was a team effort.

Design

The industrial design style was applied to the intranet modeling closely to the company’s website. Logos for each company were applied to the siloed sites, and a combined logo was used for the few shared resource sites. One company had a different color scheme, but each site had continuity in the user-friendly design throughout.

Reporting/Dashboards

KPIs were built in modern libraries to track things like accuracy, inventory, analysis of various durations for services, claims, sales etc. Adding JSON to indicate acceptable in and out of range data with colored formatting and indicators was added for visual reporting. These libraries replaced a very manual KPI Log that was being kept in Excel and emailed to executives prior to review meetings. With this information in SharePoint, supervisors were able to review KPIs at will.