Spotlight Group Intranet Case Study

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Spotlight Group (SGH) is a privately held Australian parent company which controls, operates and invests in a diverse set of businesses and assets. Our group interest includes the iconic retail brands Spotlight, Anaconda and Harris Scarfe, as well as a group property portfolio and our charity the Spotlight Foundation. SGH, through these interests, employs 12,000 people and has operations throughout Australia and New Zealand and South East Asia.

The Challenge

We conducted an organisation-wide team survey to identify the key areas of change to focus on. Communication and collaboration were two of these areas. At the time, we didn’t have a way of communicating across the business other than through email. This led to challenges with emails getting lost in inboxes and a lack of cross-brand content sharing. For example, half the people who work at Spotlight didn’t know we own Anaconda or were entitled to employee discounts at Anaconda stores.

We had different intranets across our businesses, but the underlying technology didn’t offer the functionality we needed. People struggled to find what they were looking for and there were no social capabilities to foster collaboration.

During one of our leadership programs, the recommendation was made to look for a new communication platform to build a central intranet that could share information and facilitate two-way interaction among the employees across our diverse businesses.

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I would recommend Elcom to other people. The implementation team were amazing. Central is bringing everything together for our 12,000 employees, with the major benefit being the ability to deliver content and communication to the entire organisation from one location. Melissa Adeson, Learning & Development Manager
Spotlight Group

The Solution

Some of the senior leaders in the organisation were brought together to become part of a steering committee to select a new intranet platform and vendor. The committee felt Elcom best met their requirements and future needs. Elcom offered a comprehensive platform, multi-site capability and unlimited user licensing model.

During the planning process, we had to rethink how to best organise the platform and use the multi-site functionality in a way that would keep information relevant to each business, while still having a place for the shared services section. For that reason, we were delivering each site separately, iterating and testing as we went.

From a delivery point of view, the Elcom implementation team were amazing. At any point, we could say we are ready now from our end and it would be rolled out in a timely manner. Being able to have that open communication with the Elcom team, who can advise us on the best way to do something based on our evolving business requirements, has been so helpful.

We have now deployed 4 intranets, named Central, using the Elcom multi-site license. The multi-site aspect was key because we needed to have a place for the shared services section and to deliver cross-brand content and documents to employees without duplicating our efforts across all sites. At the same time, our retail brands can keep their own branding and personalities, as well as deliver brand specific news, communications, and documents relevant to their own employees.

Central brings everything employees might need to access together in one interface. This includes quicklinks to relevant systems, which are really important for helping retail store employees who don’t have company devices.

We integrate Central with other programs to pull in base user data. We have 12,000 employees across 4 different countries in 3 different databases. It was a challenge to link the data backwards and forwards, but we succeeded in bringing user data into Central in a consistent manner. The success was due to the collaboration between our team, our payroll, data supplier, and Elcom, ensuring continuity of data from different systems.

Collaboration was the key other focus. The Corporate Directory and People Finder enable our geographically dispersed workforce to find people from various locations. Employee shoutouts, as well as the ability to nominate and reward and recognise team members is fantastic. The Team pages enable us to create spaces around social communities and for various teams. For example, Anaconda has clubs for 4wd and fishing enthusiasts.

We are currently focused on improving Central and continuing to make refinements including rolling out the Acknowledgements module, which can track if people have viewed notices. We are also about to roll out the Events module to make it easier for us to promote and manage events for employees.

The Benefits

We now have a multi-site that gives us the ability to deliver communications and content to our entire business across multiple countries and brands with different templates in a timely and consistent manner. The biggest challenge was we had no way to deliver information other than sending emails. Elcom has provided us with a personalised communication platform, removing one of our main concerns from an internal communications perspective.

‘Central’ is helping to bring culture to life and connect our employees to the brands. It enables people to easily find and access knowledge and information to help make their jobs and days easier, whether it’s to access a link to another system or to find cross-brand documents that needs to be shared to all businesses, as well as brand specific content.

The intranet also facilitates two-way interaction and collaboration from a central platform that we were previously missing, from shoutouts and rewards and recognition to the People Finder and Team pages. For example, before we introduced Teams pages, people used WhatsApp, Viber and other social groups to share information. This isn’t ideal as there was very little control over the content being shared. Now that communication will come through Central.

We have only just started but transitioning from a paper-based business with over 200 sites to a more streamlined process with online forms and workflows will be extraordinary. We will be able to automate manual tasks, reduce paper administration, and support teams working at retail stores or in different office locations, saving valuable team time. We are also seeing considerable time savings gained from the ability to quickly put content up once across 4 sites, rather than doing so one at a time.

As our workforce is so large, the unlimited user licensing is important, especially as we are about to start recruitment for around 800 Christmas casuals. We will be able to provide them with access to Central even though they don’t have company email addresses.

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