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STAR Group

Established in 1957 by the Andrews family, STAR Group is a privately owned Tier 1 electrical, communications and maintenance contractor specialising in electrical, data and communications, high voltage, audio-visual, engineering and wholesale services. STAR Group services a range of sectors, including health, government, commercial, mining, transport and rail.

The Challenge

At Star Group, we perform a lot of tasks manually and wanted to automate and improve these processes. It made sense to start with an intranet, which would become our central information and communication hub, connecting current and future software we have in the business.

As a large business in a heavily regulated industry, we have a huge depository of documents with no real automation around it. The previous ‘intranet’ was based around an online spreadsheet. Staff would click on the tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet to switch between areas and then click on hyperlinks to view documents. The inability to tag, search and filter those documents and get what you want quickly was a big pain point for employees.

We also embarked on a website redesign. Our audience is generally tech-savvy but time poor, so we looked at ways for the website to be easier to use and navigate. It had to be modern, informative and mobile responsive.


Elcom were awesome throughout the build process and beyond. Our account manager, trainer and the helpdesk team really helped us understand how to best use the product for our needs. We’re going to keep building on our solution, so it continues being a valuable resource for the business. Ryan Davey, Associate Director - Operations
STAR Group

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The Solution

We chose Elcom to design and build our new website and intranet. We already had a great partnership with the Elcom team, who have been our website provider for a long time, and knew their CMS offered everything we needed. We decided to launch the intranet as a sub-site of the main website. Since we were upgrading the website to the latest product version, it was a good time to redesign it as well.

The motivation for us to create a new intranet came from employee feedback, especially those on the ground getting the job done. We ran a lot of employee engagement surveys and classified the data into micro-level groups. We were able to see what pain points different areas experienced, such as regional offices vs those in Sydney near head office.

Once we had a solid team together, it helped to push along the project internally. Elcom’s expert team was always readily available to guide us, and they have structures in place, so we always kept on top of what needed to be done.


The Star Group website now has a new modern and uncluttered look and feel. It is easy to navigate and mobile responsive. Given the large number of projects shown on the website, we use Elcom’s meta tagging feature to classify projects by section, service, region and status. This lets visitors drill down to view the most relevant projects for their needs.

We're currently rolling out the intranet in phases, so we don’t overwhelm our staff. The first stage introduced expected functions such as quicklinks to other systems, document management, search engine, as well as the corporate directory and organisation charts updated via an Active Directory integration. We also use meta tags on our intranet, so documents dynamically appear in both the Documents section, where all documents are housed, and contextually in sections across the intranet.

We’ve set up several automated processes using forms and workflows to manage everything from travel requests to internal job applications. As part of our commitment to safety, we have a HSEQ (Health, Safety, Environment, & Quality) section with news, quality checklists, safety datasheets, project HSEW setup form and incident tracking. Staff simply fill in an incident notification form for workplace injuries, equipment damage and other incidents. This triggers a workflow requesting approval. Once approved, the system generates an article that appears in the Incident Library, which can then be found via search or filtering through all incidences. It can also trigger support tasks to be completed to enable efficient tracking management.

We’re excited about the learning management system (LMS). Different training courses, such as General Induction, Manual Handling Awareness Training and General Warehouse Induction, will be available for staff, where they can then enrol in and complete at their own pace. Administrators will be able to report on individual and team results, as well as attendance levels to monitor progress and success.


The Benefits

  • The redesigned website delivers an engaging user experience. It does a great job of reassuring potential clients that STAR Group has the skills and capabilities to deliver the services required by a complex project, showcasing hundreds of our current and completed projects and highlighting our certifications. 
  • The intranet is deployed as a sub-site of the website. For administrators and publishers, it appears as subfolders under the website site folder structure, which makes it easier for the same team to manage both sites. It also requires no additional platform cost, as it is part of the same platform. 
  • The power of the platform is how user friendly it is for administrators and publishers. We launched the intranet recently and we’re already seeing a lot of quick wins around speeding up existing processes. We're using forms and workflows as a tool to automate operations around HR, financial requests and administration. They’re easy to set up, are knocking down the number of steps in each process, and reducing the time to process forms.
  • Since we work in a highly regulated industry, we’re really excited about improving and automating both the staff training and incident tracking processes. With an LMS, we can bring the many training programs we have online, making it much more efficient and easier to manage, deploy and report on. It’ll go a long way in improving our induction and internal training processes.
  • The Incident tracking manager enables us to capture, publish and monitor incidences automatically from our geographically diverse workforce. At the same time, we can leverage quality controls such as publishing via a form template and approval workflows, resulting in less errors in submissions and standardised information.

This is going to be an evolution; we’re going to keep building on the intranet, so it becomes a valuable hub for the business now and in the future.
 


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