How dormakaba launched an award-winning intranet in just six weeks
In 2015, two huge global brands Dorma and Kaba merged to form dormakaba. As part of the strategy for managing the transition internally, the enterprise sought to implement a new intranet that could be used as a tool for unifying employees and keeping them informed and productive throughout a period of intense change.
dormakaba chose to adopt a Unily intranet as it enabled them to deploy a feature-rich, social intranet solution in just 6 weeks.
To our delight, and despite the aggressive launch strategy, the intranet solution caught the attention of the Nielsen Norman Group and was selected as one of the top ten intranet designs of 2016.
dormakaba’s new social intranet platform has now become a trusted vehicle for delivering 'Access to Innovation' for the entire global business, overcoming the hurdles of language barriers and disparate employees.
Read this case study to discover;
- The key drivers for dormakaba's Intranet solution
- What they hoped to achieve
- Why dormakaba chose a Unily digital workplace solution
- Feature breakdown of dormakaba's solution, including screenshots
- Key functionality
- Achievement statistics post launch
- dormakaba & Unily's continuing success
Bringing two global brands together
In September 2015, Dorma and Kaba merged to become dormakaba, creating one of the top three companies in the global market for security and access solutions. Headquartered in Germany, the internationally active dormakaba employs 16,000 worldwide and is represented in more that 50 countries.
Together, the two companies offer their customers a comprehensive portfolio of products, solutions and services for security and building access, so these customers can get everything relating to access and opening and closing doors from a single source.
Both companies have a long tradition of innovation and engineering skill. On the way to its strategic objective of innovation leadership within the industry, Dormakaba links customer requirements to technological trends and develops a continuous stream of groundbreaking solutions that create added value for customers and users.
An ambitious approach to driving innovation
At the heart of dormakaba’s success in manufacturing is the constant innovation required to develop new products and solutions, essential to staying ahead of the market and the competition.
dormakaba’s internal International Group Conference and the trade fair BAU are the primary channels through which they launch new innovative products. Their intranet is a crucial vehicle for driving this innovation throughout the business and keeping employees informed and engaged.
With the latest conference and trade fair on the horizon, and a view to make a big positive impact on how the company continues to innovate into the future, dormakaba decided they wanted a brand new social intranet solution to support their endeavors.
This new system was to enable “Access to Innovation” for all dormakaba employees around the globe, using cutting edge technology to facilitate their work. This would allow dormakaba to capitalise on internal knowledge and support greater collaboration across their global business, revolutionising the way staff communicate with each other and the wider business.
dormakaba’s business requirement was to deliver this new intranet solution before the next conference and trade fair, only months away. To achieve this, they chose to adopt Unily; Unily’s Intranet as a Service, which allowed them to deploy a feature full intranet solution in just 60 days.
Deploying a feature-full, future-proof solution
dormakaba’s Unily intranet featured a host of functionality, some that was already a part of the solution and some that was developed specifically to meet their needs. Each aspect of the solution delivered into their vision for success and now supports them to be more collaborative and innovative than ever before.
Dynamic internal communications
Effective internal communications is essential to dormakaba, enabling them to connect the business from top to bottom and across locations. Their intranet facilitates this through a dynamic Smart Feed feature which sits front and centre on the homepage. Made up of latest company ‘Stories’ including News, Announcements, Insights and Applications, the most important and relevant information for each user is surfaced from across the digital workplace.
Alongside Smart Feed functionality, employees can immerse themselves in the latest news and innovation from across the company via the ‘Stories’ homepage. News, Videos, Events and Insights are intelligently tagged and indexed across the site via an intuitive Content Management System, allowing users to personalise and target what communications are most relevant to them, whether it be by location, department, interest or project.
By adopting a Unily cloud intranet as a service dormakaba have 654% increase in corporate news coverage in comparison to their previous intranet solution. In addition, they have seen 27% cost saving through the consolidation of their existing SharePoint portals. 15% cost saving through the 6 week deployment vs 9 month average SharePoint intranet time frame.
Enterprise social and people directory
Comprehensive integration of Enterprise Social Network Yammer across the intranet supports more effective and higher quality communications for dormakaba. Intuitive Social Feeds as well as Sharing, Liking and Commenting functionality allows for up-to-the- minute insights, giving staff a voice. This enables employees to effectively contribute to the internal knowledge pool that’s so essential for product innovation.
Real-time communication within the intranet represented a significant cultural shift for Dormakaba. This was managed through a carefully designed change management program built on governance, adoption and communication heroes.
dormakaba’s new people directory builds upon their enterprise social functionality to support greater collaboration, enabling users to search for colleagues based on skills, location and other refiners. Profile cards display quick contact information and seamless Skype for Business integration allows for instant communication with colleagues.
CMS made easy
The custom CMS (Content Management System) behind the scenes has simplified the process of content creation for content owners by making the process intuitive and quick. This has allowed content creators to focus on the content, not the process of building it, empowering internal communications teams and reducing the strain on Dormakaba’s IT team.
Engagement of content owners and intranet managers was essential to the success of dormakaba’s adoption of the Unily solution. These individuals were bought on-board with a tailored adoption program that included strategy, communication, on-site training and on-site training and workshops so that they could deliver the most from the new platform.
Document management
dormakaba’s Unily intranet features a comprehensive DMS (Document Management System), providing a single place to discover and upload documents.
All documents from across the intranet can be rapidly refined by name, content, author, document type and more to help employees find the information they’re looking for rapidly, wherever they’re stored. The Documents experience allows for intuitive and quick document upload and meta data tagging, to ensure documents remain easy to find. Multiple documents can be uploaded with shared meta data for even greater efficiency.
It also supports compliance and legal aspects through version control, which was essential for Dormakaba, as they had stringent data security and data protection requirements, both legal, and internal processes. This challenge was overcome through on-boarding senior stakeholders with the benefits of the Cloud, and a certain amount of customisation of the solution to make it compliant with Dormakaba’s matrix of requirements.
Digital workspaces
New functional digital spaces have provided a space for dormakaba employees to work and collaborate using powerful SharePoint Subsites. Digital workspaces quickly and easily surface content relating to global or local functions, departments, teams, and projects, keeping staff connected to the materials and people they need to be most productive.
Mobile first, cloud first
Built on the powerful Microsoft cloud, Unily provides complete mobile accessibility through responsive design and a host of native Applications for Windows Phone, iOS and Android. This new mobile functionality is keeping dormakaba’s employees connected on the go and supports their modern flexible workstyles, empowering staff to get work done anywhere, anytime.
Partnering for success
Unily worked closely with dormakaba every step of the way to ensure that they would get the most out of their new solution.
The outset of the project involved bespoke consultancy services, automating migration of data to bring the legacy system and infrastructure elements to the new platform, such as active directory sync and single sign on setup.
Click translation to engage diverse users
During the project there was also the challenge of meeting dormakaba’s multi-lingual requirements as a company with strong regional hubs. To overcome this Unily developed a whole new core functionality for the product that combined content targeting and machine translation, providing better access to content for employees across the world. Multi-lingual functionality across the intranet allows individual users to set a primary language and then translate content across the intranet to any language at the click of a button.
This new content translation feature is a perfect example of Unily’s customer- led roadmap in action, as content translation was introduced as a new core functionality of the solution for all clients.
The launch of new company products and for providing reports from the BAU trade fair to all employees during Go-Live week, a crucial event for dormakaba’s business development.
Employees were able to instantly get involved, comment and share insights from the trade fair due to Yammer social functionality. This led to new teams forming on various topics, driving fresh collaboration. Dormakaba managed to distribute content to all of their staff, including video material, in a very short amount of time and people started to communicate instantly via the new platform globally. Mobile access to the solution has kept people engaged with intranet activity like never before, as the native applications provide consistent user experiences for remote users.
Social functionality driving innovation
dormakaba’s new social intranet needed to deliver “access to innovation” and it had to be launched within a 60 day timeframe to meet their business requirements. With Unily this was achieved, and more. The new social intranet was used to communicate
Comprehensive success program
Unily is also delivered with a comprehensive success program, all as a part of the package. Underlying services such as support teams, on-going consultancy to drive good governance, and a customer-led roadmap of future features means that dormakaba have an intranet platform that will evolve to meet their needs as they continue to grow and develop.