A Social Intranet for the Future.Faller Packaging.
The new intranet is to become the most important hub that enables all Faller employees to remain up to date – at any time and from anywhere. To achieve this, the data from different sources and departments had to be structured and organised. But as in many medium-sized companies, this merging of the database is a complex undertaking. Still our goal was to provide an intranet within a very short time. So the MVP contains the most important functions such as the news, the telephone book and an organisational chart. Based on this foundation, the system can continue to grow; and at the same time, all employees can continuously notice major improvements.
The new intranet was given the name "FOX". At the beginning, an internal user survey was conducted. From this, we derived the most important requirements for the implementation. The focus was on a modern and user-friendly UX. Here, a simple and intuitive operation, both desktop and mobile, was key. In terms of content, it should be possible to integrate relevant content via APIs in addition to the news system. The entire intranet hub should also be available in multiple languages and have a high-performance search function - so that everyone can find everything. The final requirement was the employee and department overview: Here there should be maintainable profiles and a large organisational chart that depicts the entire company structure.
We worked with Contentful for the implementation. The big advantage here is the unique usability: content can be made available quickly and easily in many languages. The out-of-the-box solution also enables good collaboration with different role rights and simple release processes. In addition, the Contentful solution enabled us to integrate content via interfaces (more on this in a moment).
Like day and night: The definition of the colour system, which was taken into account in the frontend toolkit from the very beginning, enables a simple switch from dark to light mode - depending on the personal preference of the user. The (user)friendly impression is rounded off by the composition of fonts and icons.
The Fox intranet is navigated via the hamburger menu - which has the "F" shape to match the logo. Here you can see the menu items at a glance and quickly reach the desired page. When expanded, it offers orientation - and when collapsed, more focus on the actual content.
Faller's intranet is not only social, but also connected: for the organisation chart, data from three sources (SAP, HR tool Rexx and via Excel files from the server) are standardised, processed and thus made available for output in the library. And also the Faller marketing materials, which are made available to all employees in FOX, are intelligently integrated. They are pulled via an interface to the DAM (Data Asset Management) and thus always remain up-to-date.
The news, which is the main feature of the FOX Intranet, is created via a publishing system with a sophisticated role and rights system. All information is specifically distributed in individual language and country versions for the different locations. Quick reactions allow all employees to interact with the messages - yeaaah 😍.
From the very beginning, Faller was a great project for us: collaborative work, sprint-based development, quick decisions - even across national borders. And exciting enhancements and improvements await FOX in the future as well: we are currently working on an automated translation function for the messages by integrating DeepL into Contentful. In addition, a large wiki is in the starting blocks: for the documentation, centralisation and standardisation of work processes. All in all, an evolving software project that is not only fun to develop but also to experience – to our taste and to the satisfaction of all stakeholders and employees.
