Silicon Reef

Committed to their Unilever Sustainable Living Plan, Unilever wanted to allow colleagues around the world to input and participate in this industry-leading programme. They were looking for an Office 365 platform to gain insights into their plans and activities, and measure interest in issues so that they could prioritise their focus. They were looking for a tool that could work in multiple languages, locations and across different devices.

We tackled the challenge by building a highly engaging, creative SharePoint-based solution that gave Unilever live access to the input of 1,000s of employees across the globe.

Unilever now have:

- A tool for employees across the globe to air their voices and choose the programmes they want to get involved with

- A fully customisable site with mobile responsive access

- Security and confidentiality through the secure network of Unilever’s Office 365 platform

The end result surpassed all KPIs and reached a far wider audience than initially anticipated.

Mondelēz International, Inc. wanted to create a hub to elevate their Research, Development & Quality (RDQ) teams’ knowledge of marketing, business and R&D best practices. The outcome would be one custom on-line platform for learning and development videos, as well as downloadable assets. 

Silicon Reef partnered with Design Bridge to create an environment that ‘pulled’ people in, rather than ‘pushing’ content onto them. Together, we created a SharePoint site which integrates Microsoft Stream to incorporate videos within the intranet site.  

The UX & UI was designed and developed to aid continuous learning and echo that of other familiar content platforms, like TED or Netflix.  

In addition to creating an engaging hub for learning content, we wanted to ensure the user experiences were maximised as much as possible to aid them in their leaning: 

First 3 months after launch: 

• 3,000+ sessions 
• 26,500+ page views 
• 8,600+ views per session 
• 1,600 repeat visitors 
• 16 minutes 9 seconds – avg. time spent on site per session 

The Mondelēz International, Inc. team told us they were very happy with the product and had received really good internal feedback on the project – including being asked to present the training hub at their big innovation event in front of the Mondelēz International, Inc. CEO and executive team. 

REAch2 were focused on developing a brand-new intranet platform which would be utilised across the Trust academy, support and teaching staff. Whilst the intranets main function would be an information portal, the Trust also wanted to create a united culture across the organisation helping employees feel part of a connected REAch2 environment. 

Ahead of Silicon Reef’s involvement, there was no intranet platform across the organisation. The team worked solely from email with large policy documents and file sharing going through their email system. This approach led to duplication and people saving and using onto outdated information.

As the Trust grew, the business needed to easily share and communicate the CEO’s messages across the UK team.  

A new REAch2 SharePoint intranet solution offered the answer to the business communication and culture challenges. 

After our ‘discovery’ review phase with REAch2 it became clear that through our partnership with Attollo – an out of the box SharePoint platform, we would be able to build a system that would deliver on all the REAch2 requirements. This approach would also allow for future growth and expansion as the organisation scales. 

Working closely with the REAch2 team, together we outlined the information architecture and designs in the initial planning phase. This included: 

• Technical analysis of the M365 tenant setup for deployment of Attollo baseline solution. 
• Site content template review to establish the key content that will be required for each content owner. 
• Design and branding alignment of the site for desktop, tablet and mobile. 
• Deployment of the Attollo solution into the REAch2 M365 tenant.  
• Diagnose Stage– training and support for site launch with key site owners. 

The global Unilever hair specialist team is responsible for the development of new formulations and product launches within the hair category.

Part of Unilever R&D, this team works across continents and manages a vast range of existing and developing products. This brings with it a massive data challenge: to move, to manage, to store and access data from multiple locations over multiple time zones.

The team was overwhelmed with vast quantities of data based in disparate systems and data centres across the globe. Locating packaging, formulation and product information was a constant challenge.

As part of a global programme to deliver a faster, more agile Unilever, the team were focused on identifying a bespoke library system that allowed easy access to a wide dataset. The new system needed to store detailed product information, imagery and packaging data. The objective was to not only categorise the existing database more efficiently but support the product development team when creating new formulations – helping them to get new products to market faster, and with greater accuracy.

We began by creating a strategic roadmap with a three-year vision. We mapped out milestones and, using agile methods, developed a MVP (minimum viable product) version of the solution and used continuous improvement to learn-and-develop, with later iterations seeing the launch of the wider scope elements.

We understood that – as with most of our engagements – the solution’s success would hinge on it meeting the exact needs and behaviours of the end users. Hence UX sat at the forefront of the project with a focused aim to ensure maximum user adoption post launch. Before developing wireframes and designs, the project team conducted interviews with the focus group and studied the team’s style of working and requirements. Well-embedded user testing became fundamental throughout the project and involved the user group through each milestone to ensure a truly people-led design.

As an international charity, Farm Africa has offices across  five  countries; the  UK,  Ethiopia,  Kenya,  Tanzania  and  Uganda.  The charity came to us with an all too common problem: all documents, across the organisation, were managed through a number of disparate and disconnected platforms, largely in a deep folder structure and, in many cases, held as multiple versions across folders.

The charity had taken the step to establish an Office 365 SharePoint site but was yet to use it effectively. Many of the SharePoint users didn’t trust that the information stored there was valid, and moved, copied and saved multiple versions outside of the platform, exacerbating the issue.

We were brought in to not only solve the functional challenge but also look at improving adoption of the tool across the workforce.

Our key priority was to ensure Farm Africa were getting the most from their Office 365 subscription, while delivering value to the community of users across the 5 countries. Together with the Farm Africa leadership we knew we wanted to create a tool that gave a quality assurance of programme delivery across all of Farm Africa’s locations, and established a ‘live’ platform for project management, tracking and collaboration.

We established a SharePoint intranet and project platform for document storage and management suitable for housing all of the charitable programmes documentation in a consistent format, and all accessed via an appealing and intuitive interface. Permissions set within the tool allowed named individuals to view, upload, edit and manage folders and files, and private group configuration gave management to select teams of GDPR compliant files.

We delivered all this with the end user firmly front-of-mind and with a rollout plan that on-boarded previous sceptics the system showed an immediate positive impact in the way Farm Africa manage data and run their business.