Founded in 1973, Hynds Group has grown from a manufacturer of pre-cast concrete products to become one of New Zealand’s leading manufacturers and suppliers of infrastructure products as diverse as concrete, PVC, vitrified clay, and ductile iron. In all, Hynds now supplies a product range of over 11,000 items from 25 locations throughout New Zealand and employs in excess of 650 people.

Keeping in touch with all of those far-flung employees and ensuring workflow processes and documentation were consistently and efficiently applied throughout such a large organisation was proving to be a challenge.

Although Hynds was using Lotus Notes and already had a HTML intranet in place, employees weren’t using it fully and the company needed something more robust with database connectivity, according to Siggy Rehburg, Hynds business process manager.

“We wanted an intranet that everybody would use and view every day, and we needed workflow as well,” says Rehburg. “Developing workflow in HTML is more difficult, so the only logical solution was to build an intranet on Lotus Notes.

“In the end, we chose Crossware because of its expertise with Lotus Notes and because it was able to bring together everything we required into a single, user-friendly solution that could be delivered on time and on budget.”

Crossware quickly identified the main issues. First, internal communication needed to be improved – team members didn’t know where colleagues were or whether they were on leave or in the office.

Second, although Hynds had done a great deal of work on its core documentation such as procedures and instructions, there was too much reliance on hard-copy data. Employees were printing documents out and keeping them in folders – Hynds wanted to get rid of all that paperwork.

Third, information sharing was limited with documents kept locally on PCs and sent by email if needed rather than available from a central, shared location.

Fourth, there was no version control of documents. “Everybody would save local copies and then later on would use an old version of a template,” says Rehburg.

Fifth, no automated Request For Improvement (RFI) system existed. Instead, information on RFIs was created in Microsoft Word and sent around by email, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Crossware tackled these diverse issues with a Lotus Notes-based intranet solution that is not only easily accessible to all Hynds employees, but also provides tools and information that make their work easier – and more fun.

A ‘people finder’ function was incorporated so team members can find out where a colleague is located, and whether he or she is the office or on leave.

“The Crossware intranet also features a notice board that ensures all team members in different locations are kept informed about the latest developments and ‘Hot News’ stories, such as which sales order is being closed, whose birthday it is, et cetera,” says Crossware director of sales and marketing Kenneth Fairgray.

Links to key applications are now at employees’ fingertips, such as commonly used forms and reports.

“For instance, different kinds of monthly reports, such as trend reports, reports on RFIs, managers’ reports, and branch results, can now be automatically generated as Excel spreadsheets,” says Fairgray.

The Crossware intranet also provides easy access to per-division support teams, and provides a calendar of events showing useful information such as vacancies per site and when the next staff party will be.

Not all Hynds employees have access to PCs with Lotus Notes so Hynds is looking at providing intranet cafés in lunch areas so these employees can access the new intranet as well.

Important documents on all kinds of policy and procedures are now shared centrally and these documents are kept under strict version control so everybody is using the right forms for HR procedures, the product library, sales and marketing documents, job applications, and so on.

“Our solution has automated the whole RFI process and made it very efficient,” says Fairgray. “Because of built-in workflow there is no longer any need to send dozens of emails back and forth between colleagues about each RFI. Now all open RFI’s can be monitored online by customer code, customer name, and initiator.”

Similarly, electronic forms for leave requests with built-in workflow means managers can approve leave online and generate email notifications – eliminating the need for paperwork. “Crossware has provided a comprehensive intranet exactly the way we wanted it,” says Rehburg.

The team directory with people search and holiday notification works perfectly and internal communication has improved because it is now very easy to publish news items and share them with all employees. And, according to Rehburg, various parts of the business have cottoned on to it and are now keen to get news items about their division published online.

“Employees not using the intranet is no longer an issue because the Crossware intranet pops up first thing when they log on to Lotus Notes. And the use of outdated documents is a thing of the past now that we’ve got a centrally managed, version controlled system,” says Rehburg.

“The automation of the RFI process is really the flagship of our intranet. We have a perfect overview of all requests and the whole process is now automated, which works so much more efficiently.”

The project took Crossware only three months to implement and has been widely regarded within Hynds as a great success that has brought additional benefits such as decreasing Hynds’ reliance on hard-copy data and allowing the company to improve their version control of documents. Opportunities for future development based on the Crossware intranet solution include process flows, workflows for health and safety document approval processes, more online forms, and further database connectivity.

Overall, Hynds is extremely impressed with how efficiently and effectively the project was implemented.

“Crossware did everything right. They reacted well and quickly – and they delivered,” says Rehburg.

“The people I had contact with at Crossware were easy to deal with. We talked the same language and they were very professional. Our IT department in particular is very happy with them.”

For more information
Crossware
www.crossware.co.nz

Paul Graham
General Manager
paul@crossware.co.nz
ph 09 379 7044

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