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Praval Technologies

Case study

The information existed. The floor couldn't reach it.

Eight in ten of a consumer-goods manufacturer's people worked a plant floor, a dock or a night shift, and the intranet had been built for head office. Rebuilt for a phone in a pocket, it now reaches the line in the same shift.

Of frontline staff use it monthly
74%Of frontline staff use it monthlyUp from 12% on the old intranet
To find the current SOP
90 secTo find the current SOPDown from around eight minutes
Read safety bulletins within 24 hours
91%Read safety bulletins within 24 hoursWhere a bulletin once took three days, with no record of who read it

The challenge

Around 3,400 of the company's 4,200 people had no desk, no laptop and no company email they checked. The intranet had been built for the other 800: desktop-first, behind the VPN, and email-led.

The SOP was in a binder, in three versions. Procedures sat at the line and in shared drives nobody could search from the floor. Operators spent around eight minutes finding the current one, or worked from memory.

A safety bulletin took three days to land. It went up on a corkboard in the break room, with no record of who had read it.

Supervisors became the intranet. Around three and a half hours a week went on printing, chasing and repeating the same announcements every shift.

Why the old one never reached the floor

Two weeks on plant floors, watching how information actually travelled on a shift, found four assumptions the old intranet made and the floor did not share:

  • It assumed a desk. A desktop layout behind a VPN is fine at head office and useless at a machine.
  • It assumed an inbox. Most of the workforce had no company mailbox to be reached through.
  • It was organised like an org chart. An operator does not think "Quality Department". They think "the SOP for this line, now".
  • Nobody owned the content. Without owners or version control, even a document someone found could not be trusted.

What we built

The rule was simple: if it takes more than two taps on a shared phone with gloves on, it won't get used. Everything ran on the Microsoft 365 they already owned.

A home screen in the app they carry. It lives inside Teams on their phone: today's shift, safety alerts and the SOPs for their line on one screen.

No company email needed. Frontline licences and shared-device sign-in let a worker badge onto a plant kiosk, get what they need and sign out.

Each site and shift sees only its own. Content is targeted by location and role, so Plant 3's night shift gets Plant 3's notices, not head-office news.

One current SOP, a tap away. Every procedure sits in one governed library with named owners and version history, and a QR code at each machine opens the right one.

Safety messages you can prove landed. Critical bulletins go to phones and record who has acknowledged them, so a plant manager can see, per shift, that they got through.

Run by Comms, not IT. The floor can comment and flag issues back, and the communications team publishes without waiting on a ticket.

It is built on SharePoint Online, Viva Connections, Viva Engage, Microsoft 365 Frontline licences, Power Apps and Microsoft Entra.

Six months after go-live

Measured against baselines recorded on the floor before the build:

  • Frontline monthly use: up from around 12% to 74%, and 79% across all staff.
  • Finding the current SOP: under 90 seconds, down from around eight minutes.
  • Safety bulletins: read by 91% within 24 hours, in the same shift, instead of three days unverified.
  • SOP revisions in circulation: one governed source, down from three across plants.
  • Printing: around 5,800 pages a month, down from 9,000.
  • Supervisor time on comms: around 40 minutes a week, down from three and a half hours.

"We used to say we had 4,200 employees and an intranet for 800 of them. Now the operator running a line at 2am has the same information I do, and I can prove the safety bulletin reached him."

— Head of Internal Communications

The answer wasn't a better-looking intranet. It was one built for the shift, not the org chart.

Recognise any of this in your own estate?

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