I love finding people-led solutions that enable this. So when my team at Silicon Reef were asked by transnational FMCG business Unilever to create a portal that would help manage their vast array of global suppliers, we immediately saw an opportunity to connect people and improve supplier engagement.

Our challenge

Unilever works with over 12,000 global suppliers to create and supply consumer products from washing powder to shampoo and food goods. They were overwhelmed with huge amounts of data, spread across different systems and data centres. This made finding relevant information time consuming and challenging.

We needed to create a communications hub to give them better access to news, events, key documents, and Power BI dashboards, as well as connecting them to the Unilever team. It would also support the development team when creating new products, helping with go-to-market faster, and with greater accuracy.

The technical details

To enable the suppliers and Unilever team to connect easily, we needed to modernise the Unilever SupplierNet solution to Microsoft 365 (M365). This meant a complete rebuild of the branding, user experience, and interfaces for supplier interaction. We moved the portal to SharePoint Online within M365. This gave Unilever:

• Consistent corporate bespoke branding across Portal Sites to signpost location and context.
• Single sign-on for suppliers using their own corporate credentials, making access easy and secure.
• Corporate group and nested group access.
• Digital support for all key activities.
• A file library for all manuals and documentation.
• Full reporting of all SAP data into Power BI for metrics and KPIs.
• Built-in security from Azure, with full ability to control user and network access.

5 ways employees are more engaged

Employees and suppliers now have a single source for all company messaging, communication, and resources, ensuring that the information they are using is timely and accurate.

Unilever Procurement Managers can now quickly and easily raise issues and incidents on their deliveries or goods directly within the portal, reducing the time it takes to raise and chase issues with suppliers.

The return of investment for Unilever will be under 12 months. This is due to a reduction in hosting costs from moving from a server farm model to using SharePoint and Power Platform.

But the added-value benefits have been significant and continue to roll in as the portal is used in earnest.

1.      Creative collaboration

Secure and discrete collaboration sites allow both suppliers and Unilever employees to confidently share information, from anywhere, on any device. This allows them to work together ad-hoc, encouraging creativity and spontaneity in the development of new products or rollouts. The hub is a place for everyone to come together. It’s a unique opportunity and – with the volume of suppliers interacting with Unilever – only possible through this technical platform.

2.      Secure and accessible file storage

Unilever has a vast array of regulatory certification requirements across a huge product range including animal testing, vegan certification, codes of practice, and other scientific documentation.

Managing these via the hub, rather than via email and attachments, creates a permanent, referenceable information trail for legal reference, and to aid future product development. SharePoint encrypts data in transit and at rest. When combined with single sign on and multi-factor authentication, it means these sensitive documents are protected.

3.      More efficient processes

Suppliers can now self-serve with access to their own performance metrics and KPIs on demand, as their own data is visible from SAP via Power BI. They can review their performance as an interactive dashboard and drill directly into the data.

Company information, procedures, up-to-date news and past documents can also be accessed without having to contact Unilever. All of this significantly drives down the volume of requests, meaning suppliers can focus on the work they need to do. This also frees up Unilever to spend more time on important work than document chasing.

4.      Faster innovation and creation

It’s easier for suppliers to input new materials into the product library. This gives Unilever direct access to the latest materials when creating new products, simply by carrying out a search.

Currently, they have libraries for fragrances, colour and naturals, with many thousands of individual items from many suppliers listed, and continually updated.

5.      Supplier empowerment

Corporate and nested group access in SharePoint allows divisional responsibilities and activities. SupplierNet gives a segregation of suppliers under their own control. Suppliers can create their own groups of users who can access key systems and block access to others. This means suppliers can control the access of their data, without breaking permissions at a higher level.

Working together without barriers

For Unilever, inviting external partners on to a collaboration platform was about far more than just sharing a document or site. It was about helping people connect to work together better, with the right information, from anywhere. And it worked – colleagues now have four times the increase of engagement against the original system.

“Feedback from the suppliers’ interviews has been uniformly positive. They consider it to be a huge step forwards. The concept of offering single sign-on to applications via a dedicated portal is something they believe will make their interactions with the complex Unilever IT architecture much easier. The suite of applications housed under the new portal provides a uniform look and feel, significantly reduces both training and barriers to access for supplier users, and increases uptake where Unilever requires suppliers to engage.”
Chris Yates, Lead SME, Supplier Integration, Unilever

Offering a tailored, permissions-based experience – one that recognises the way a supplier or partner actually works – brings significant benefits far beyond the financial ROI. Not only does it boost engagement, it also significantly improves management of security, and enables a greater collaboration between host and partner, and even between the partners themselves.

A solution like SupplierNet allows this communication. And, as in the case of Unilever’s Supplier Partners, when the users feel engaged, they are more informed, quicker to raise and respond to issues, and more efficient in their dealings with the business.

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About the author

Alex Graves is Founder and Managing Director of UK-based Microsoft 365 Agency Silicon Reef. Alex started his career in IT Training, honed his skills in IT project management and, three-years ago, started Silicon Reef with a group of like-minded friends and colleagues.

With his passion for blowing the boundaries away from conventional working practices, Alex leads the strategy thread of the business, helping clients to design operational and technical solutions to improve collaboration, employee engagement, and productivity.

Alex was on a perpetual hunt to discover the work/life balance and thinks he has found his own with the Silicon Reef model. Now he’s shifted his focus on bringing this balance to his clients.

The post How Unilever streamlined processes and empowered employees appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is home for all your documents on Teams. Plus, you can use it to engage and inform your employees via common resources, applications, and to transform your business process no matter what device your employee is on. This means you’ll have more productive and connected teams, fuelling a collaborative workplace.

Below are some tips on getting started to drive this productivity and engagement.

5 tips to empower a collaborative workplace with SharePoint

1.  How to set up a SharePoint

If you have already created a team within Teams, you’ll have a SharePoint site already created. Just click the dots and Open in SharePoint to access your site.

To create one from scratch, click the Create Site button on the SharePoint home page. A wizard will guide you to name the site, decide if it’s public or private, and its basic functions.

Once you’ve got the basic site, you’re ready to customise it. Choose a SharePoint theme and customise it with your logo and branding or stick to the classic styles.

You’ll get a home page, document library, OneNote notebook. You’ll be able to add pages to further customise your SharePoint for your team.

On your pages, you can add videos, news, and more using out-of-the-box web parts. These web parts help your team quickly glean and access relevant information. By providing a rich experience to your employees, they’ll be more likely to engage with your new collaborative workplace hub. Don’t forget to create a Teams for your SharePoint site if you haven’t already!

Expert SharePoint tip: IT Teams can create consistent sites using site designs and site scripts. Find out how here.

1. 1. Set up
   2. Customise
   3. Teams it!

2. Create a SharePoint hub

A hub makes it easier for your organisation to collaborate and connect. It connects and organises sites based on project, department, regions, etc. This makes it easy for your employees to discover related content and news.

Think of it as virtual ‘connective tissue’ of your intranet. This also means you can provide a consistent experience across all sites. Once sites are connected to the hub, you’ll see news and activity from all of them aggregated onto the one hub.

Once you’ve established a hub, it’s easy to associate your SharePoint site. In settings, click site information and just click the hub you want.

Expert SharePoint Tip: We know the business landscape can change. This is why SharePoint works with your business – it’s a dynamic way to match sites for projects and departments and move them around as needed. You can update or remove the hub your site is connected to anytime.

3. Keep track of projects in Planner

Planner makes task management in teams even easier. It’s a visual organiser where you can create plans, share and assign tasks, and get updates on progress. You can integrate Planner in your SharePoint site making it even easier to plan and share tasks with your team.

To add a new plan, press the + New button on your homepage. It will add Planner to your navigation pane so your whole team can easily access it in one click.

You can also add Planner as a web part to your homepage. This gives you the ability to add plan information directly on pages or news posts. You can choose between the Planner Board or Charts view to also appear on your homepage to give a handy, relevant overview for your team.

Expert SharePoint Tip: Have a project with a third-party or partner? Give them guest access to your collaborative workplace to make planning easier.

4. Sharing SharePoint sites externally

When you’re sharing documents, plans, and ideas for projects and other business information, it’s important to ensure team members have secure and easy access. However, sometimes you want to share this with vendors.

Please note that external sharing over your entire SharePoint environment is turned on by default. Global and SharePoint Admins can adjust this in their admin site.

Once you’ve chosen the organisation sharing environment and the types of access; you can also control access to select sites. This is useful if you have confidential business information that you don’t want to share past your organisation. You can store this information on sites where external sharing has been turned off. Then you can choose which sites you want to add guests to.

To do this, a Global or SharePoint Admin needs to access the SharePoint Admin Center. There, they choose the site and select its sharing option.

While this means you can allow different sharing levels for different sites, please note that if an admin changes the organisation sharing level, it will reflect in the sites. For example, if external sharing is turned off for your organisation, the shared links at site level will stop working.

Expert SharePoint Tip: While SharePoint benefits from built-in intelligence and security with Office 365, the SharePoint Admin centre makes it easy for your IT team to configure access and sharing levels.

5. Making business easier

SharePoint lists collect data, just like you might collect information in Excel. Lists can be anything from contacts, tasks, to business-critical operations. Lists let your teams  gather, track, and share information within SharePoint libraries.

Add Microsoft Flow and PowerApps to this powerful data and you can create rich digital experiences with forms, workflows and custom apps that work across devices. And best of all – these work on Teams too, making communication and collaboration even easier.

For example, you can have a list tracking important conferences and the staffing plans for these. Add in a form powered by PowerApps to make it a richer experience that easy to track.

SharePoint also lets you create automated processes to accelerate productivity and let your employees focus on business-critical work. Use the simple, visual designer Microsoft Flow to lay out the steps. It can be as simple as configuring alerts and approvals to modelling complex processes.

Expert SharePoint Tip: Flow helps you focus on work instead of getting bogged down in tasks. Find easy-to-implement templates to help automate your work.

Conclusion

With the right tools, such as Teams and SharePoint, you can make teamwork a fun and easy process. Because they work together and you can create powerful add-ons to them, it makes online collaboration intuitive across any device no matter where employees are located, increasing employee engagement and productivity.

Find out more

See how Marks and Spencer are leveraging SharePoint to drive employee engagement

Re-think employee engagement for the modern workplace

Discover how to use Microsoft Teams to fuel the collaborative workplace

The post Using online tools to create a collaborative workplace: Part 2 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.