OVERVIEW
Komatsu is a global manufacturer and distributor that provides essential earthmoving equipment, technologies and services to the construction, mining, energy, government, waste and quarry industries. Komatsu creates value through manufacturing and technology innovation to empower a sustainable future where people, businesses and our planet thrive together.
THE BUSINESS PROBLEM
Komatsu’s existing intranet built in SharePoint Classic had become out of date.
Pages did not render well on mobile devices and it was difficult to find required resources. Challenging content creation processes meant that the intranet was not updated as frequently as it should have been.
The company’s complex global structure had resulted in a corresponding SharePoint structure with 15 sites and subsites and 50 lists and libraries. It was difficult to maintain and govern and due to SharePoint Classic’s hierarchical structure, any changes to the intranet required a lot of migration and management.
It was time to move to SharePoint Modern.
HOW WE HELPED
WebVine had originally proposed a new SharePoint Modern intranet, merging Komatsu’s many subsites into one cohesive framework. However through our extensive requirements gathering process, it became apparent that Komatsu would face user resistance to such a significant structural change.
In response to user adoption considerations, it was agreed to replicate Komatsu’s navigation structure spanning multiple SharePoint sites with in-page navigation to reach site-specific pages.
This presented an interesting technical challenge for WebVine as we used flexible design and workaround solutions to deliver a similar user experience via Modern hub sites. We recreated 150 pages in the Modern framework, migrating content and leveraging Injio’s knowledge and document hub modules to replace the Classic page hierarchy. Topics and tabs replaced pages and sub-pages to deliver a more search-driven wiki-like experience.
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Komatsu’s new SharePoint Modern intranet looks fantastic and delivers a user friendly, familiar experience to staff. Komatsu’s user-led approach has led to strong adoption and some excellent feedback.
The internal communications team can easily create mobile friendly pages using branded template pages as well as schedule news for later publication. SharePoint Modern’s flexible hub site structure makes future changes straightforward and more functionality can gradually be introduced to further enhance the user experience.
