Maintaining a custom-made intranet is often time-consuming and when the existing one’s layout and structure get outdated, it is time to look for a new solution. With three intranet in-a-box solutions nearing the finish lane, Ballast Nedam, a construction company from the Netherlands, chose Valo.
- Industry: Construction
- Country: Netherlands
- Company Size: 1001 – 5000 users
Starting Point: Old intranet was highly used but had an outdated layout and bad structure.
Ballast Nedam combines a competitive ambition and a customer-oriented way of working with ‘a smart look at cost efficiency, technology, global expertise and focus on operational excellence’. All this is difficult to achieve without modern communications tools, that Ballast Nedam didn’t earlier have. Now it was time to take the next step and this is where the interest in renewing their intranet began.
Solution: A new, more easily maintained, responsive and multilingual intranet. Portiva, one of Valo’s Premium Partners from the Netherlands, implemented the new intranet to Ballast Nedam.
Benefits: A solution which has all the basic components and is also easy to build on in the future.
A beautiful intranet that is easy to maintain
The need for a new and better intranet was around for a long time at Ballast Nedam.
“We had an old intranet that was, and is, in heavy use with internal news and vacancies. If there is something everyone should know, we use the intranet. There are also all kind of pages for employees, where they can, for example, share information and documents with other departments. However, it is very unstructured and has an old-fashioned design,” explains Vahid Keshavarz, Project Manager of Ballast Nedam, the starting point.
Maintenance costs were also an important issue as adapting and maintaining the old intranet took a lot of time. As a replacement, Ballast Nedam was looking for a solution that looked better, was more efficient and would cost less to maintain.
Detailed requirements
Ballast Nedam is a tech-savvy company, so when Portiva was approached to be part of the project, there were already detailed requirements for the new solution.
We had done our research and we knew what we needed and what suited our organization best. Before we spoke to Portiva, we already knew Valo. One strength of the intranet in-a-box solution we found was that it was not a complicated, large product. That was exactly what we were looking for, a solution that has all the basic components and the ability to build on it in the future.
A logical choice for the new intranet
Ballast Nedam asked a number of companies for an offer and three of them met the requirements. Responsiveness and multilinguality were important, but no longer an issue with the three remaining solutions.
Was the decision then solely based on price? “Definitely not. We were looking for a product that met all our needs but when there are three offers in the finish line that all fit inside requirements, then it is logical to consider the price tag as well”, tells Vahid about the final selection.
Pilot period with old and new intranet running simultaneously
When it comes to user feedback on intranet adoption, no feedback is often considered as ‘good news’. At least according to Ballast Nedam who set up a small pilot group to use the new Valo intranet before implementing it throughout the whole company.
Keshavarz explains the relatively long pilot period: ‘Configuring and adding content costs time. We are running the old and the new intranet in parallel and News is currently published to both intranets. We haven’t heard fundamental criticism from the pilot group. The comments we get are often specific to the users own wishes and nothing really jumps out. It simply works.“
The Ballast Nedam’s Customer Case was first published on Portiva’s website.
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