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Featured Case Study - Web CMS Intranet Solution

The FGL Sports (a Canadian Tire company) is Canada’s largest national retailer of sporting goods, offering a comprehensive assortment of brand-name and private-brand products, operating stores from coast to coast.

FGL’s corporate and franchise banners include:

All stores offer brand-name sports and lifestyle products, as well as a number of private brands. The Company employs over 14,000 people in communities across Canada and owned by Canadian Tire.

Forzani's Needs

1. Improve communications between corporate and employees at both head office and the 229 stores.
2. To reduce the amount of email received by employees each day by providing them with a better channel for communicating ‘light’ information.
3. Help improve employee engagement at FGL and ideally improving the connection to FGL for store employees.

Project Challenges

The existing FGL Intranet site was unable to achieve new communication directives. Some of the major issues that contributed to the inflexibility of the Intranet site included:

1. An outdated look and feel of the Intranet.
2. The site consisted of 80% dead or outdated content.
3. The site’s code structure as well as its general technology backbone was severely flawed and required major rework as it lacked scalability. It was becoming increasingly difficult for FGL to support and maintain, let alone build upon.
4. Initial purpose of the Intranet, with its multitude of user groups had deviated since its creation and was being neglected in adding new features and technology improvements.
5. Due to the lack of content focus or ability to update the site, FGL had to resort to workarounds for internal communication (mass internal emails, paper communiqués, etc). This unfortunately resulted in a negative impact counterproductive to the Intranet’s intended purpose.

Falcon-Software's Solution

FGL was looking for a web development firm that specializes in content management software integration, providing services and support for all aspects of the development lifecycle of FGL’s proposed new Employee Intranet. Combining the information Falcon-Software collected during the discovery stage, discussions with FGL and Falcon-Software’s knowledge and experience developing corporate Intranets, we defined the scope of work for the project to include the following:

• Providing project management, expert knowledge and support specifically around the complexities of implementing a CMS driven Intranet site.
• Work with FGL’s graphic team and marketing team to create a user interface for the FLG Employee Intranet that provided a compelling user experience while effectively conveying the values and brand image of FGL.
• Work with FGL’s Information Architect to structure the Employee Intranet’s information architecture, taxonomy, and page layouts to focus on overall usability making it easy for everyone to use the Intranet, resulting in a high level of user adoption by employees.
• Architect and develop a scalable and flexible Intranet platform that will serve as the foundation for FGL’s Employee Intranet and allow for continuous improvements and advanced web services/applications to be integrated into the system in the future.
• Recommended potential features and functionality additions to the Employee Intranet Project for consideration.
• Provide sufficient training and ensure internal procedures are in place to secure a high adoption rate of FGL’s internal users of the CMS.
• Provide support services to FGL’s staff during the project and post-project release.

Key Achievements

• Bilingual Intranet – With stores across Canada, providing content in both English and French was very important.  The CMS allows FGL to translate all content that is presented on the Intranet.
• Active Directory Syncing – A key challenge of this Intranet was managing the employee profiles and login credentials while minimizing the effort required.  User data, including profile and login credentials, are synced from FGL’s internal Active Directory to the CMS. 
• Content Scheduling – With content scheduling, FGL is able to prepare content ahead of time and determine when that content will be visible on the website.  This allows FGL to keep the Intranet content fresh while minimizes the effort required by content administrators.
• Community Bulletin Board – The bulletin board allows FGL store employees from across the country to communicate with each other.
• CEO Blog – Another system geared to creating a sense of connection between the employees and executive management.

The Results

Falcon-Software provided an Intranet solution that allowed FGL administrators to easily create and modify content in multiple languages keeping the Intranet fresh, current and relevant to their thousands of employees across Canada.

Forzani's Intranet Screenshot

Falcon-Software offers website planning, creative design, development, Ektron, Elcom, EPiServer, Kentico, SharePoint, Sitecore, and Sitefinity implementations, CMS training and server hosting services. We invite you to get started today. Call us for a free consultation at 800-957-1126 or complete our Consultation Request Form.