Johnstone Supply is the top cooperative wholesale distributor of HVACR products in the country with 370 independently-owned stores and over $1.3 billion in sales.
As a Cooperative, effective communications are important to Johnstone Supply. Work had previously been done to create the company’s main communication platform using SharePoint. It was time for a fresh look and an improvement in the search experience. Johnstone came to us for help in building a system that would achieve that. We evaluated their current intranet site, identified the challenges and concluded we needed to build a new site that would:
• Make it easy to find relevant documents and intranet content with minimum effort
• Improve the document publishing process
• Organize and categorize links to make more user-friendly
• Consolidate content make the design more attractive and consistent
To solve the challenges, we designed and built a heavily customized SharePoint intranet application. To make documents easier to find, we tagged them with metadata including the category and archive date. We also built the new system, known as JEN, with homepage links in the header and the footer that were relevant and easy to see. These links led to all other content, so that JEN could be the portal to access all information. In addition, staff members were now able to search for documents right on the home page.
The project was completed in December of 2011. The new design and navigation has made it significantly easier to find information and documents quickly, and has enhanced communications for the organization.
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