You are looking at implementing a corporate portal with a view to:
- Improving access to company information
- Streamlining internal processes
- Improving employee productivity
A corporate portal would put all the information within your organization in one central location and provide easy access to all your employees. They would know where to find the information that they are looking for. They would also be able to add in knowledge that they acquire and share it with others in the organization.
We suggest that you divide the implementation of the portal into 3 phases:
Phase 1:
In this phase, your portal can implement a general area for all employees and a specific area for each employee, department or project. A 'portal administrator' will control the general area. The respective owners will control the specific areas. The owner of an area will be able to delegate control to specific functions on his area to other employees.
Each of your employees will be given a user ID and a password to access the portal and his specific area. Using this, your employee could access the portal both from within the company's network and from the Internet.
Your portal will have a specific page for each project. This page can hold links to the job estimates, timesheets and other project documents.
The portal will also have areas specific to each type of information, for example, Human Resource Policies, Marketing Policies, etc.
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Phase 2:
In this phase, the portal can add online calendars - each employee can have an online calendar that other users can view. This will help in scheduling employee time. We could also integrate this with your mail system and provide a web-based interface to your office email. This will enable employees to access their mail from anywhere.
One of the features that you asked for is to enable employees to give their feedback online. One way this could be implemented is by creating a discussion forum where employees could voice and discuss their suggestions and complaints under different topics and others could also offer their views. This feature would also meet your requirement of fostering a sense of community among the employees.
In this phase, the portal could also implement the feature of employee evaluations. Each superior could have the facility to evaluate his subordinates. Those subordinates would be able to track their evaluations in their personal area.
For improving work processes within the company, there could be a separate process area where each process would be documented. Employees can review the process at any time and give their feedback for changes/improvements.
Phase 3:
In this phase, we could implement the client extranet. Each of your clients would be able to log in to a secure area and view the status of his projects. He would also have access to all relevant project documents from this area.
A client would also be able to report and track issues/change requests.
Employees in charge of the projects would have a facility to update the current status of the project and issues.
We could integrate the extranet with any existing call center application that you may have. There are technologies where a client could click on a button within the extranet and initiate a live chat with a support person. This would help the client resolve issues at real time. |
