Ambitious building society transforms internal communications
Business Drivers
In under three years, Family Building Society’s business grew rapidly which meant legacy communication systems and processes became inefficient. Staff were sharing documents via email and spending a lot of time searching for information on a central network drive. As the number of employees grew, from 90 to 160, it had a knock-on effect by dramatically increasing the volume of emails being sent and received, which in turn put staff productivity
at risk. To remedy this Family Building Society wanted to create an intranet using SharePoint, but its small development team lacked the time and resources to develop the intranet in-house.
Benefits
Family Building Society’s intranet is used to host documents such as manuals and policies that staff frequently access, and has led to a much more collaborative way of working. It is also space for staff to coordinate the many social activities they are involved in. In the initial implementation review, the employees gave the new system extremely positive feedback. Family Building Society plan to extend the use of the intranet further, by adding further collaborative workflow functionality.
The SharePoint licensing was purchased via Trustmarque’s CloudESP, which simplifies the purchase and management of cloud services. This enabled Family Building Society to benefit from monthly billing, giving them the freedom to upgrade to SharePoint Plan 2 at a time convenient to the business, rather than waiting for the 12-month renewal.
Solution
Family Building Society engaged Trustmarques’ professional services team to develop its intranet platform. Working with the customer to identify the right technology to suit their business challenge, Trustmarque first delivered a series of preliminary workshops to demonstrate the potential of SharePoint as a solution.
Family Building Society’s existing data was migrated to the intranet which was further integrated with Microsoft Active Directory, providing a smooth and secure experience for users. The project was delivered in an eight-week agile development project, which gave them a central portal for all their employees to communicate quickly, access forms and documents, and share data.
As well as the initial workshops, Trustmarque helped Family Building Society understand how it could benefit from the technology.
“Office 365 offers more than just email, something that is often overlooked by many companies. In Family Building Society’s case, using SharePoint to power its intranet was an ideal way for the company to foster greater collaboration and simplify communication. The work we have done with Family Building Society in delivering their intranet and meeting their objectives is a testament to our end-to-end IT service capabilities and expertise with Microsoft products and licensing. Facilitating easy collaboration and communication allows Family Building Society to put its efforts into continuing to provide an excellent service to customers.”
James Brennan, Trustmarque’s Sharepoint Consultant
About the Family Building Society
Family Building Society is a forward-thinking financial services organisation that helps individual families, whatever their structure or composition, to make the most of their money and assets through products and services. Family Building Society has circa 160 employees based at their headquarters in Epsom, Surrey.
“The intranet is the first thing staff see when they switch their computers on, and in just a few clicks they can be collaborating easily with their colleagues… This simplicity means our employees can communicate quickly without being snowed under by email.
Michael Feather, Head of Business Change at Family Building Society
Why Trustmarque?
Trustmarque’s many years’ of experience in Microsoft products combined with our expertise in delivering and implementing cloud solutions made us a perfect fit to deliver Family Building Society’s solution.
“Trustmarque understood exactly what business outcomes we wanted to achieve, and delivered an intranet that met these aims; providing the necessary consultation and training on the way. By helping consolidate some of our existing legacy systems, Trustmarque has helped us ‘future-proof’ the intranet, and has also shown us the potential benefits of moving other services to the cloud in the future.”
Michael Feather, Head of Business Change at Family Building Society
