Case Study
Tuliptech empowered Riekes Equipment – a leading material handling and warehouse solutions provider – to efficiently bifurcate, search, navigate, and secure their company data. This was achieved by moving away from a Legacy Word Press solution and consolidating the data to a more enhanced intranet based on a Sharepoint Hub site architecture.
We partnered with Tulip to build a new company intranet. We had an old Word Press site and several old SharePoint sites – It was quickly becoming unmanageable. The Tulip team helped us pull together a great site that hit all of our needs.”
-Lisa Brink,
Director of Marketing, Riekes Equipment.
For a company in the logistics and supply chain industry, efficient management and access to data plays a crucial role in expanding the business.
In addition, there was a growing need for department workspace and company level communication around culture and recognition. A consolidated intranet strategy was the answer.
Riekes Equipment had a Legacy Word Press site and multiple outdated SharePoint sites for management and communication. But for a rapidly
expanding company with ever–growing need for data management, the existing infrastructure often failed to meet the requirement.
How do you consolidate data from all the nooks and crannies of the existing architecture to a bifurcated and user–friendly, easy to search and navigate architecture? How can it empower its employees to access and leverage relevant data to optimize operations and fuel further growth?
Answering these questions with the company’s existing IT infrastructure was difficult. Riekes Equipment needed to leverage future–ready technology such as the hub site architecture and SharePoint’s powerful search feature to access and dynamically navigate between sites and data.
“We had a vision and a site map, but our team had never used SharePoint as a CMS before. We had some very specific needs and didn’t know where to start”
– Lisa Brink, Director of Marketing, Riekes Equipment.
The path forward would be challenging for both teams as it was critical to keep the end users in mind. There had to be a balance of leveraging new functionality and custom widgets with the need for ongoing maintenance to be handled by the Riekes Team. And employees were very comfortable using the previous intranet so the transition needed to be seamless for them. As a result, we went through multiple mockups of each site’s expected UIs with various focus groups, allowing us to deliver unmatched functionality with an intuitive user experience.
Custom widget similar to what Riekes Equipment had in the beginning to maintain a consistent user experience.
A redesigned weather image to match the website’s overall design and experience
Custom way to browse and archive document libraries and showcase latest documents.
Custom way to browse and archive document libraries and showcase latest documents.
We created a separate site for each department with a standard user–friendly header consistent across all sites. A custom–built homepage of the intranet acted as the root site of the solution, linking all the other sites with authority to configure the navigations. A customised roll–up footer docked the access to 9 links and 3 social media redirects. The solution allowed a proper bifurcation of data between departments.
Customised Roll-up Footer
Data is as good as a user’s ability to access them. The Hub site architecture, coupled with SharePoint’s optimized search tool, allowed for harmonious cross–departmental searches and results.
SharePoint optimised Search Tool
Restricting access to some data was equally important for Riekes Equipment. To achieve that, we divided the user groups into different permission levels and security groups to be moderated by the Administrator. Item level permissions further restricted sensitive data.
Out-of-box Hubsite navigation configuration.
We created a central location for non departmental related documents. For documents related to the department, we stored them on the in department document library.
”Not only did they provide complete documentation on the site, but also held a training for our
content creators. Tulip was a wonderful partner throughout the process.”
– Lisa Brink, Director of Marketing, Riekes Equipment
After reinventing data management and navigation, Riekes Equipment is now exploring new ways. Multiple knowledge transfer sessions were held between Tuliptech and the Riekes team, accompanied by detailed documentation. Employees now know how to search relevant data,
access and navigate with improved efficiency. All carried out on a robust, secure, and user– friendly architecture.
Our work for Riekes Equipment was all about augmenting capabilities, allowing them to save time and get more out of the available tools.
The task was challenging, connecting all the bits and pieces and bringing them under a single robust network. But the results were definitely worth the climb.
We’re pleased that Riekes Equipment can now effortlessly search, access, and navigate data to explore new growth opportunities.”
Founder and CEO, TulipTech
If you would like to know more about Microsoft SharePoint, SharePoint Migration, Microsoft Power BI , Microsoft Dynamics , Microsoft 365 please feel free to reach out to the TulipTech team.