How SharePoint Acts as a Backbone for Logistics Firms

According to Association for Information and Image Management (2016), 85% of respondents follow SharePoint as their Intranet Portal and 92% made their Intranet Portal as the major collaboration suite that consists of corporate team sites, workplaces etc.

Speaking about collaboration, it can be classified into the below:

1. Document Management (80%)
2. Web Content Management (30%) or
3. Records Management (47%)

Also, the requirements vary depending on the Industry and organization sizes.

How does SharePoint act as a backbone for Logistics Firms? Well, let’s start with the potential benefits first: 

1. Document Management with tagging feature
2. SharePoint Version Control for Documents to keep track of different document versions.
3. Easy to update content
4. Mobile Responsive design that suites a large number of mobile devices (Especially for employees who work on site that do not have access to laptops or PCs)
5. Document Approval Workflows to avoid paper works for signatures/approvals.
6. Alerts/Important Announcements that notifies users with important news/happenings.

Forming a Plan for the right solution

The major requirement for a Logistics SharePoint Intranet is to have a better visual appeal, compatible with all major browsers, tablet and mobile friendly, which is easier to update content. If the SharePoint Intranet is more of a public website, you need to take care of the SEO, analytics and installing tracking codes for improving site visibility.

Also, SharePoint supports integration with top-notch solutions such as Dynamics AX, GP and NAV*. There are integration plugins that is readily available for CRM solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Salesforce.com to make your lives easier!

Cost Effectiveness 

SharePoint offers CS3 and HTML5 capabilities for delivering the best performance as a Content Management System. With the responsive layout features, you will be able to build the best design practices for a complete responsive website with device support and multi-browser experience.

Cost savings would be in terms of saving hardware. Procuring a lot of laptops or PCs for Intranet purpose is a waste of money. So, having a mobile responsive intranet will solve the problem by getting tablets and smartphones, which is convenient for employees working on site.

Quick Upload of Files and Images

During our user training sessions with the employees, we have to spend less than an hour for the users to understand the web content editing features using SharePoint Online.

The employees can upload any type of documents, files or even images. Even if the user is creating a carousel control to display their office pictures/plans, the images will fit in the carousel perfectly without any distortions. This feature alone saves lot of business hours of the employees as well as our technical support every month! Users can edit/crop the images, change the aspect rations within the browser itself.

Maintenance 

If its SharePoint, no more IT interventions required! 95% of the SharePoint site updates are managed by the HR and Marketing/Communications staff today. They can easily navigate through the functions, edit banners, change links, add or delete pages etc. The pages can be set under draft state for the higher authorities to review before it gets published.

Approval Workflows

This could be a necessity for a logistics company where several documents go under review via several departments. SharePoint has the capability to set up different departmental workflows to achieve the same. For example, a document that requires a review before it’s been published should go under a 5-level workflow starting from an Executive to Manager, Manager to Sr. Manager, Sr. Manager to Department Head, Department Head to Director and finally Director to the CEO level.