Case: development of an intranet portal for SCUD Tech

Created a closed corporate portal for a group of companies with offices in 11 regions of Russia. We created an environment for communication, sharing important documents and news, and training new employees. Read more below.

Customer

SCAD tech group of companies is one of the leaders in the development and integration OF software for automated process control in the oil and gas sector, mining and metallurgical industry, energy, and transport.

The company's offices are distributed throughout Russia: the main office in Moscow, offices in Tolyatti, Nizhny Novgorod, Ufa, Tomsk, Tyumen, Samara, Khabarovsk, Sarov, Ulyanovsk. In addition to the "SCUD tech", group of companies includes "ASC Engineering" and "Necessities". The total number of employees in the group is more than 1,100 people.

Aim

Create an internal corporate portal that will be the center of interaction in the company between:

management and employees,

different departments,

employees within departments.

Situation

The client contacted us in August 2018. The company recently updated its corporate website, but it was aimed at an external audience and did not solve problems related to HR and employee communications.

The input data was as follows:

The company has an extensive matrix structure: there are many horizontal and vertical departments with departments within each. Moreover, these departments are distributed throughout Russia.

There is almost no communication between departments and departments of the company. Employees do not know each other and do not communicate.

There is no tool for centrally communicating information to all employees or collecting feedback. It is difficult to implement and maintain uniform internal standards.

Planing and designing

We discussed all the client's requirements, formulated the task, and described it in detail in the terms of reference. Here's what should be on the internal portal:

Information about all GC departments and their divisions.

The directory of employees. Information about each person: name, photo, what Department and office they work for when their birthday is.

Everything that accompanies the procedure for hiring an employee and certifications.

Documents required for review.

Internal news, corporate magazine issues.

A tool for collecting feedback.

UI/UX design

The internal portal should correspond to the corporate style of the company and echo the design of the corporate website.

We have prepared a UI kit that reflects the different States of all interface elements.

SCUD tech has an interesting and voluminous internal structure. There are many divisions in different cities of Russia, departments, and business units that "serve" them with their own departments. When designing, we tried to display this structure in a convenient and understandable way for employees.

In the visual part, we followed the company's style and the general style of the corporate website in order to create continuity of the visual style. Everything turned out to be concise and simple — just as we wanted.

Implementation

The directory of employees. Integration with Active Directory

One of the most important tasks of the internal portal is to publish information about employees. We needed to create cards for each of the company's 1,100+ employees and create a correct representation of the structure and hierarchy of departments and departments.

But creating such a large number of accounts for employees manually, and then regularly adding new people and closing access for those who have left is an almost impossible task. Therefore, during the system design process, the customer and I decided to integrate with the Microsoft Active Directory system.

Microsoft Active Directory is a single point of authentication and authorization for users across the organization. The SCUD tech Department uses this system to create and store employee accounts in the enterprise's network infrastructure.

The peculiarity of its infrastructure of the group of companies is that each company has its own internal domain of the Active Directory directory service. Therefore, users are imported to the portal not from one external system (domain), but from three different ones.

With Active Directory integration, you don't need to create another employee directory and keep it up-to-date. The primary source is always data from Active Directory. Employee data is updated once a day. If a new employee appears in the upload, their card will automatically appear on the portal. The activity status is also checked: the dismissed employee will not be able to log in.

What is uploaded from Active Directory to the internal portal:

The hierarchy of departments and divisions is also imported from Active Directory and updated in the portal.

If the upload data does not match the information on the site, the administrator can compare different versions and make a choice in favor of the current one.

Authorization on the portal

Only employees should have access to the internal portal of the group of companies, as it contains a lot of confidential information: internal documents, personal data, etc.

To log in to the portal, an employee uses the username and password of their work computer account. When you log in to the portal, a request is sent to Active Directory, and data is checked in real-time.

When the password is updated for the account (and this happens quite often for security reasons), the password for logging in to the internal portal is also changed.

The directory of employees

We designed all the key scenarios for working with the directory, and made a convenient system for searching, filtering, and sorting employees.

By full name or position of a particular person.
By the city where the office is located.
For one or more departments.
By departments.

In the list of employees of a Department or Department, the head of the Department is displayed first.

Documents

The internal portal stores documents that are used by certain groups of employees. The portal administrator sets access restrictions for documents so that only those who have the right to do so can see them.

In addition, we have created a notification system — if a mandatory document is uploaded to the portal, information about it appears at the top of the site and does not disappear until the employee clicks on "read".

On-boarding system: hiring and adapting new employees

The appearance of a new employee in the company is the moment when a huge amount of information is received. And in a big company like SCUD tech, new people come to work very often.

The task of the portal, which we help the HR Department to solve — is to help people not to "drown", to systematize the available data, to understand them. On the internal portal, we have placed a reference guide for those who have left for work to help them adapt to the company and simplify the integration procedure.

The directory is different for each company. Depending on where the employee goes, they automatically get access to the appropriate section.

The directory contains a memo to a new employee, general information about a group of companies, and essential contacts. In addition, the materials necessary for preparing an employee for certification are also uploaded here.

What else?

Internal company news. It publishes events from the company's life that do not get to the corporate website.

System for receiving requests. An employee can use the form to send a request addressed to a specific responsible person. The answer to your question will be sent to your corporate email address.

Result

At the moment, the internal portal is being integrated into the company's processes, and feedback is being collected from department managers and employees.

We set a goal for Creonit to create a convenient and easy-to-use corporate portal that will be a pleasure to use. We needed a tool that could easily get information about any employee, find the right document, or download an issue of a corporate magazine. I think that everything worked out.

We would like to thank our colleagues from Creonit for their prompt solution to all issues, flexibility in designing when we needed to choose the best way to exchange information, and for the fact that our specialists took into account all the internal requirements of our IT Department.

We recently started giving employees access to the portal, and we are now collecting feedback. The HR Department has big plans for its development, so it is possible that we will expand and Refine its capabilities.

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SCUD tech

Internal portal for a group of companies