SSP Group serves up transformational change with Microsoft SharePoint

When I arrived, I inherited a very fragmented architecture. We had 35 different systems in 35 different countries and a lot of those systems were reaching end of life,” explains Mark Smith, Chief Digital & Technology Officer at SSP Group. “We had to face into that technology obsolescence. We could continue with the old way of doing things or we could do something transformative.”

Over 18 months, SSP laid out a new technology strategy to create a global platform that would enable staff to communicate seamlessly and to collaborate with colleagues across countries. The goal was for consistent processes, systems and data with a 20 percent variation to take into account local custom, practice and legislation.

“The business is very commercially driven, so building the business case was important,” remembers Mark Smith. “We wanted to use the same amount of money we would have invested in the old to invest in something new. With Microsoft 365 we could bring all of these ‘softer’ benefits – improved security, communication, collaboration, etc. We could spend the same amount of money but get much more for that money – that made it a fairly simple decision to proceed.”

At the moment, SharePoint and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite has been rolled out to 10,000 office staff and unit managers.

Doing more with the technology budget

SSP worked to consolidate its email systems during the first 12 months of work, moving away from old Lotus Notes and Exchange servers and into the Microsoft 365 tenant.

“Microsoft 365 was one component of our new, common global platform,” recalls Mark Smith. “And it has proved to be a much more important part of that vision than we realised when we first started – partly because of the pandemic and partly as a consequence of how important it has been for the business to communicate, collaborate and interact.”

The second phase, towards the end of 2019, was to explore how the business could leverage other elements of Microsoft 365, including SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.

This proved extremely prescient. “We had the tools to roll it out quite quickly when the pandemic hit. Everything closed in a matter of days around the world. We used a lot of the Teams infrastructure to do Teams meetings, townhalls and webcasts and chat. We could use that infrastructure to connect with managers in our stores. In the UK, we organised weekly Teams calls which proved the primary vehicle for keeping our colleagues engaged – and we kept that drum beat up on a weekly basis for 18 months.”

Augmenting the new productivity and collaboration tools with SharePoint

The business recognised that SharePoint was another important way to meet the urgent need to communicate with colleagues.

The existing communications platform was very basic, difficult to use and the opportunities to customise were very limited. Consequently, corporate communications had relied on a mixture of emails and posters.

Work to modernise was already underway. Andreas Hajiantoni, now Head of Service Transition & Infrastructure Projects, then Communications & Workload Manager in SSP UK’s central operations team had developed a basic SharePoint site as part of the original business case. It included a news carousel, document storage and quick links to essential information about corporate branding. He had used custom templates in SharePoint to show how pages could be customised to different colour palettes to reflect the business’ brands and franchises. Business users were already very excited about the potential of SharePoint.

Understanding business needs before beginning development

SSP Group’s Modern Workplace team spent many hours upfront to understand what the business needed. Andreas Hajiantoni explains, “We worked with colleagues to understand how they use the current Intranet and to understand what their needs are. We really wanted to think about it in advance so we could get the navigation and the templates right from the start.”

SSP worked to develop SharePoint champions and super users throughout SSP Group operations, working with the different countries to help them build out their own SharePoint Intranet sites. Together, they built out different sites on SharePoint for the group, brands, countries and business functions to empower employees to self-serve the information they needed.

“It became a huge change to our way of working and productivity within the business,” states Mark Smith.

Harnessing the ability to tailor content

“The lockdowns also drove adoption; people had to use the technology,” admits Andreas Hajiantoni. “From a colleague point of view, the pandemic forced us about ten to fifteen years ahead digitally. It also meant we had to change the way we rolled SharePoint out. Originally, I was planning to deliver training in person – but I was forced to deliver it online. For that, I used Microsoft Teams.”

The 47 champions across the 35 countries met every single week and Andreas Hajiantoni would train them on different elements of SharePoint.

“We’ve customised all the colours and logos. We’re using the global navigation pullouts. On our group page, we have latest news, upcoming events, a share price widget, time zone and weather for our different locations. It’s a mix of out-of-the-box, third-party and custom web apps,” says Andreas Hajiantoni. “Then we have different country pages, both for operations and for our units, with tailored news and quick links. And our brand pages are tailored again, so the news on our Starbucks pages, for example, is tailored to our Starbucks users with their news and campaigns and countdowns.”

The pace of transformation will continue with a rollout to frontline workers

To aid with adoption throughout the pandemic period, the SSP team published hints and tips for how to use the new Microsoft 365 tools. This was shared on Teams and on the SharePoint intranet. “People were interacting with those every week,” recalls Mark Smith, “Now, as people are onboarded into the business, one of the mandatory pieces of training is that content – which shows how important Microsoft 365 has become to the business.”

The goal is now to roll out further to encompass SSP Group’s 30,000 frontline workers. A five-year roadmap will develop SSP Group’s use of SharePoint, including embedding videos and interactive content, tailored news and approvals processes.

The next step will be to create a personalised page for individual users on which they will be able to see a tailored page of content pulled from the pages they follow. Users can easily choose to follow and unfollow using a button at the top of each page on the Intranet. Andreas Hajiantoni adds, “We’re also looking to build custom content within the SharePoint app, such as payday notifications, financial year planning and SSP’s Event Calendar.”

Fantastic feedback from business users

Feedback from users has been very positive, says Andreas Hajiantoni: “A lot of our colleagues are mobile first and they love the fact there’s a SharePoint app. We didn’t have that capability before. The feedback from people is that they love being notified when news is posted.”

Mark Smith concurs, “We’ve now got a tool that enables us to communicate more effectively with our colleague base. And I think that has really helped communication in a lot of operational places – communicating out new recipes or news to our ops colleagues and making it possible to share documents consistently. Our global CEO’s messages are now cascaded instantaneously to every part of the world through one post. That will, hopefully, now continue to cascade out further as we engage the frontline workforce with SharePoint. Now, I want to drive the engagement further.”

The information within SharePoint will help in this drive for greater engagement. Andreas Hajiantoni explains, “The great thing about this is we now have our usage statistics, we can see who’s looking at our news and at what time of day. We can see what is the best time of day to post a news article. We’ve never been able to do that before. And that’s going to help us drive engagement.”

The importance of SharePoint as a central file repository

Another major advantage of SharePoint has been to enable collaboration between colleagues across locations and countries. “SharePoint is very important as our backend file share to enable people to work on, share and collaborate on documents,” states Mark Smith. “Before, we had files and folders everywhere and people couldn’t find them. SharePoint’s integration with OneDrive and its search functionality have been big advantages for us.”

Francisco Castillo, Head of Infrastructure at SSP Group, confirms, “Having SharePoint as the file system has enabled us to remove all the on-premises file servers and dependencies. As a result, we can manage our environment more securely and effectively.”

“Our users have seen how they can work on files wherever they are. They can work on the same files at the same time with people in other teams. They can work from the office or at home,” continues Francisco Castillo. “At the same time, we have increased security and improved access control. Granular access control and data loss protection is immediately made easier because of the integration between Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.”

Francisco Castillo states, “It’s easier to work on the environment now. In the past, if something happened with the file server, it was an emergency situation. Now, we avoid this type of situation so, with the Microsoft 365 environment, we can be more proactive and use our time more productively. We’ve had the opportunity to develop our skills in SharePoint and all the Microsoft 365 tools. That’s a continual evolution thanks to the investment Microsoft makes in these tools. Becoming Microsoft certified is an extra motivation for my team.”

Partnership with Microsoft feels like an extension of the internal team

As well as leaning into the training and certifications offered by Microsoft, SSP Group has made a cultural shift from viewing the company as a supplier to seeing Microsoft as a partner and drawing on the support and expertise available.

“I was keen to work with our partner ecosystem to move things forward,” explains Mark Smith. “And to bring more professionalism to the partnership. Microsoft has helped us with infrastructure and Microsoft Azure, with SharePoint and now we’re looking at data and AI. It feels like they are an extended part of my technology team now.”

SharePoint is just the start of doing more with what SSP already has

“It isn’t just SharePoint, it’s the whole Microsoft ecosystem,” continues Mark Smith. “Including Power BI and Power Apps. We’re seeing more and more of our business colleagues using these tools to enable efficiency and better ways of working. Previously, this would have come into the IT factory for us to develop something, whereas now our users are able to do it themselves.”

The UK Finance team has created a fantastic series of dashboards using Power BI. Different parts of the business have created Power Apps to solve particular problems. In the UK head office, for example, a Power App was created for visitors to self-check-in. They are given a temporary Wi-Fi code and, Mark Smith explains, “It provides a much better journey for visitors into office, the people with whom they are meeting and our facilities staff.”

Building digital skills throughout the company

“There’s a lot of knowledge in our teams, with lots of people coming up with lots of good ideas. And an idea can come from anywhere in the business,” says Mark Smith. “I’d like to enable more opportunities for technology colleagues to move into the business and to skill up business colleagues to move into IT. There can be a tendency for our Upper Crust colleagues to speak Upper Crust and our IT staff speak binary. With these tools, we can build technology skills with people who know what happens inside our units.”

“It has been a conscious strategy to give people the right tools and to work with Microsoft to give them the right training. The tools are very easy to use. If they’re willing to invest a small amount of time to develop their competency, they can use the tools to be very, very effective.”

Cost and space savings

SSP Group has made direct savings from its investment in Microsoft 365 in addition to the “softer” productivity and security benefits.

“Just based on the cost of the licences for our old communications platform and switching off the datacentre footprint where it used to be hosted has delivered a huge saving,” states Andreas Hajiantoni.

“Microsoft 365 is really the first global platform that we’ve ever implemented in SSP,” says Mark Smith. “Anybody can collaborate with anybody else in the world now. The whole adoption – both through training and it being so easy to use – has been smooth. And I’ve got fewer versions of the same document flying around on email. That means we have better version control, which ultimately helps us save space and limit our environmental footprint.”

Initial work shows a saving of 32.450mt CO2e a month by moving onto Microsoft 365.

Ready for the journey ahead

The savings and productivity improvements achieved so far are just the beginning for SSP Group.

“Microsoft continually develops these platforms,” says Andreas Hajiantoni. “We’re getting evolutions and things like Microsoft Viva Connections. That’s helped us to develop our roadmap as well.”

“This journey isn’t finished by a long shot,” agrees Mark Smith. “Microsoft brings expertise to the table to help us move forward in not only the areas we’ve discussed but also in terms of getting value out of our Azure infrastructure and in data and analytics and artificial intelligence. We have a great account team who are very helpful in supporting us towards our goals.”