PepsiCo Russia is the largest producer of soft drinks and snack products in Russia, and the CIS states (the former Soviet Union). A consolidated consumer brand company that includes Frito Lay, Gatorade, Quaker Oats, that recently integrated many regional food and juice brands and companies such as ZKZ Lebedyansky and Wimm-Bill-Dann.
Of course, with many new companies speedily integrated under the PepsiCo Russia brand, and dozens of different disparate employee groups, the new consolidated company required a new, modern interactive intranet portal to facilitate collaboration and interaction with a highly social, enterprise 2.0 focus. With social in mind, the project team looked to external social media to influence and shape the collaboration functionality, namely: Facebook, VKontakte, LinkedIn, and Google +.
“We studied the (user) experience of the world’s best social networking sites, and combined it with the concepts of enterprise portals,” says project lead, Eugene Karpov, Intranet Solutions Department Manager at WSS Consulting, the systems integration team that built the portal presentation layer on top of Microsoft SharePoint. The total budget, excluding SharePoint licensing: US$100,000.
The employed technology is WSS Consulting’s own portal product (using ASP.NET) for the front-end, and SharePoint for the back-end and files repository; allowing editors to work with SharePoint’s rich feature set and still deploy ultra-fast ASP.NET pages for casual users. It’s really fast: the server returns pages in less than 0.2 seconds. Content itself is presented in both Russian, and English.
The new portal showcases leading social tools and functionality including:
- Social profiles
- Activity streams
- Community membership
- Quick polls
- Webparts for Weather and Birthdays
- Document management
- City specific portals (geographic location)
Today, 5,000 employees have portal access, but many more thousands of factory floor workers will be extended access in the future. In the future, planned, forthcoming functionality will include:
- Department change notifications
- Bulletin boards
- “Favorites” functionality on virtually all elements of the portal
PepsiCo Russia is demonstrating that not all social intranets are the purview of the Western World and the standard Latin alphabet, but also in emerging capital markets that employ different languages and alphabets. The social intranet continues to transcend industries and geographical borders….
Read more about the social intranet in The Social Intranet White Paper