Centralising communications and information for Suntory Beverage & Food Asia

The challenge

Suntory Beverage & Food Asia (SBFA) is a leader in the beverage and food industry, with a regional head office in Singapore and presence across 11 locations in the region.

SBFA was looking to consistently improve its communications across its business. The team identified an opportunity to develop a central internal portal that could house all staff communications, as well as act as a way for teams to share important business information between dispersed offices quickly and easily.

Key issues

One of the key drivers for implementing a new central communication platform was a need to house and access resources such as company news, IT manuals and business policies across the organisation. SBFA operates under four different structures, requiring a range of viewing and access capabilities to ensure correct teams can find and open documents relevant to them.

SBFA recognised the potential time savings and efficiency it could gain, by delivering a portal that acted as a central means of contact across the organisation. This portal would bring its teams together, from storing and updating important corporate information, and offering a dynamic resource centre to staff.

Another reason for the new implementation was the requirement to support flexibility within the organisation, promote internal job opportunities, and remove the previous slow and manual multiple-step application process. SBFA was keen to support their team’s growth and development and make it easier for employees to view and apply for jobs within their organisation.

Solution

SBFA connected with Telstra Purple, Telstra’s technology services consulting specialist arm that puts purpose and people at the core of technology.

Telstra Purple began by asking "why?" to identify the exact needs of the people within the business and design a bespoke solution to meet the company’s objectives. The team worked closely with SBFA to review current processes, test their requirements and identify the best solution to unlock collaboration, streamline communications, and deliver innovation through cloud applications.

Through a deeper understanding of SBFA’s customer journey, the Telstra Purple team identified and demonstrated how Microsoft SharePoint on Office 365 would offer the optimal solution to deliver on SBFA’s objectives.

SharePoint is a cloud-based solution that supports the management and sharing of information, resources, and applications across a variety of channels.

As part of the process Telstra Purple:

• Delivered a dynamic, easy-to-operate communication platform with a variety of viewing options.
• Created a platform to support staff and management in their roles.
• Supported a long-term customer as they continue to digitally transform their business.

Outcome

The roll-out of SharePoint across SBFA has enabled better engagement and internal communications, as well as improving the ability to deliver new content regularly across a variety of formats.

The SBFA team who worked with Telstra Purple found it an agile process focused on collaboration. Together, they identified new challenges and opportunities to tailor the SharePoint solution to SBFA’s specific business needs along the way.

Telstra Purple constantly engaged SBFA to fine-tune the solution to better meet its needs, which is something the company continues to do as it explores new ways for collaboration across the platform.

SBFA can now create engaging audio and video content to be shared on Microsoft Stream. This was particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic when employees were working from home, supporting the delivery of content such as working from home tips and celebrations of SBFA’s front-line workers.

• Streamlined processes – dynamic ability to make changes to the platform, in some cases instantly.
• User engagement – increased opportunity to communicate across the business in Asia and globally.
• Improved communication – information and resources available for staff to source and share.

Key takeaways

Telstra Purple’s roll-out of Microsoft SharePoint across SBFA catered specifically to the collaboration needs of a globally dispersed workforce, serving the company well during the pandemic.

By implementing SharePoint when it was migrating from an old system, SBFA was able to streamline and remove much of its manual processes. This helped to broaden its communication base.

Through an agile approach, Telstra was able to make modifications to the functionality of SharePoint, in some cases instantly, as new opportunities appeared – demonstrating the multi-level experience the team brought to this solution and operating model.

Transforming employee experiences for Suntory Beverage & Food Asia case study (PDF, 821KB)