From SharePoint to a custom intranet in just 3 months

Leroy Merlin is a home improvement and gardening retailer, serving several countries globally. In Poland alone, it has 72 large-format stores in all major cities and helps thousands of customers create their dream homes every day. Leroy Merlin’s employees were in need of a better tool for collaboration, knowledge sharing, and communication. The old SharePoint-based intranet in use at Leroy Merlin had become inadequate and too costly.

What role does an intranet play for Leroy Merlin?

Over 80% of the 13, 000-strong team at Leroy Merlin use their corporate intranet daily and, the solution is a core tool for company-wide communications. Each of the 72 stores has their own site on the intranet. Communication with key HQ departments – like HR and Finance – also plays an important role in keeping everyone well-informed and engaged. The intranet is absolutely crucial as a communication hub, both for shaping the company culture and supporting everyone’s daily workflows.

To serve this function, the intranet needs to offer flexibility, provide great user experience, and work quickly. It should also integrate seamlessly with the constellation of other tools used by Leroy Merlin’s employees, and provide the Product Owners with actionable analytical insights.

Maintenance costs, expensive Microsoft licenses, and incompatibility with other systems were blockers for further growth on Microsoft SharePoint and Office365. To address these challenges, Leroy Merlin decided to migrate from SharePoint to Google Workspace.

With the intranet being a core tool for Leroy Merlin’s internal communication, the transition needed to be seamless. Existing features and processes also needed to be available and replicable in the new intranet from day one, without any hiccups.

Timing was an additional challenge: Frontkom had 3 months until Leroy Merlin’s Microsoft licenses would be renewed. This hard deadline put the pressure on to deliver the new intranet and migrate everyone out of Microsoft SharePoint and Office365 before operating costs increased.

When time is of the essence, communication is the key

We quickly kickstarted the cooperation, with a discovery phase, including product strategy workshops with all key stakeholders, available data reviews, and Event Storming to map the business domain. As always, being user-centric was key. We ran design thinking workshops with employees at five different stores and analyzed the results to understand users’ needs.

Because of our expertise and experience, we were well-prepared to propose the right solution architecture very quickly and to help the Communications Department flawlessly manage the upcoming organizational changes.

We proposed a modern and flexible Laravel-based web application as the new custom Intranet solution to supplement Google Workspace. This technology opens the door for in-depth usage analytics and flexibility with ongoing UX optimizations, as well as easy integrations with multiple third-party applications.

We chose a hands-on approach. Working within such a short lead time, clear communication was key to the success of the project. The development process was agile and fast-paced. Together with the client’s dedicated Product Owner and their team, we worked in 2-week sprints.

Updates were done on a daily basis, and outcomes were presented at regular demo meetings, allowing for continuous feedback and course corrections.

Seamless transition to a new intranet platform and ready to expand

We made it! Within 3 months, the new Intranet was ready – launched smoothly, and on time. From day one, the user adoption and comfort with the platform exceeded expectations. Moreover, this project was the starting point for a broader long-term partnership between Leroy Merlin’s Communications Department and Frontkom.

An intranet is a key tool in quick communication between employees. Its optimization brings bottom-line savings, through improvements in both operational efficiency and customer experience. On-demand access to knowledge and information enables Leroy Merlin employees to provide better service to their customers every day.

Thanks to the new solution and our continued cooperation, Leroy Merlin’s Communications team is now also equipped with data-based insights about how the company’s employees are communicating, collaborating, and interacting with each other.

Going forward, our teams are working closely together on further development, starting with additional integrations between the new intranet and other apps and solutions in Leroy Merlin’s tech stack.