Asia Pacific Standardises on SharePoint

The Client

Valvoline, a division of Ashland Inc., serves more than 100 countries worldwide and is a leading marketer, distributor and producer of quality branded automotive and industrial products and services. Products include automotive lubricants, transmission fluids, gear oils, hydraulic lubricants, automotive chemicals, specialty products, greases and cooling system products. Valvoline also offers Eagle One car care products for automotive cleaning and maintenance.

Business Demands

Provide a better way to manage and access the various types of informational assets of the organisation. The content of the site ranges from process and procedure documents and phone lists through to news, image galleries, logos, newsletters, catalogues, product information, technical specs, MSDSs, etc, etc. All these assets needed to be managed by their logical owners or creators and not by the Information Technology department.

Solution Description

SharePoint 3.0 is the sole intranet for the Australia / Pacific region. All previous intranets have now been migrated across to SharePoint and previous intranets de-commissioned. The solution also integrates with Active Directory and SQL Reporting Services.

The intranet supports nearly 300 users across this region (Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines) from about 25 sites and all users have the SharePoint intranet configured as their browser home page. The intranet is also accessible globally by about 11,000 users. The Asia Pacific intranet is one of only 3 intranets globally, the other two being in the US and Europe. Europe also use SharePoint 3.0 as their intranet. The US intranet is the oldest and in time will also be replaced.

The Asia Pacific intranet has sub-sites for each of the businesses; Valvoline Australia, Valvoline New Zealand, Valvoline Philippines, Drew Australia, Water Technologies New Zealand and Ashland Pacific Australia.

All of the laptop users have remote VPN access to the intranet.

Marketing is responsible for company communications and they manage the home page together with the look and feel of the whole site. Marketing have access to Site Usage Reports and regularly monitor how well the site is being used.

All departments have permissions to manage their own pages and documents. The Information Technology department’s only involvement is maintaining permissions. They have no role in maintaining the pages or content on the site.

The types of content of the site range from process and procedure documents and phone lists through to news, image galleries, logos, newsletters, catalogues, product information, technical specs, MSDSs, etc, etc.

Valvoline have also integrated SharePoint with SQL Reporting Services so that reports appear embedded in web pages on the intranet.

SharePoint includes a very good search facility that unlike other products requires no on-going maintenance. Navigation links are automatically included.

There are also clearly identified business needs that will be delivered with other SharePoint features such as incoming email, secured pages and workflow.

The intranet is also seen as a platform for delivering specialised business applications. One such application is a technical forum being implemented by the Water Technologies business in New Zealand. They have a need for their field reps to be able to post technical questions to the forum and have area experts from anywhere in the business globally to respond. The information gathered needs to be able to be catalogued and archived to be able to be searched in the future. They will use this to build a database of area experts.

Solution Benefits

Some of the benefits to Valvoline are the fact that it is integrated with a global Active Directory and so access and publish permissions can be easily managed. Documents once uploaded are quickly and easily accessible over our global MPLS network. This was much more difficult to manage in the past (and much slower) when they lived on local Windows file shares.

Result

In summary, SharePoint has enabled global access to the information assets of the organisation and has allowed the various business units and departments a greater degree of autonomy in maintaining their own data and user access. It has provided a uniform manner in which to store and retrieve informational assets and is a platform upon which further applications can be developed and deployed.