Canadian Tire inTIREnet Portal
"I Envision... a corporate intranet that allows Canadian Tire employees access to the information that they require through an intuitive interface, while providing streamlined processes and increased operational efficiencies ”
The Client
Canadian Tire Retail and its Associate Dealers together form one of Canada's best-known and most successful retailers, with more than 475 stores from coast to coast. Canadian Tire offers customers a large selection of national and retail brands through three 'stores' under one roof - automotive parts, accessories and service; sports and leisure products; and home products. www.canadiantire.ca offers Canadians the opportunity to shop online and is among the country's top three busiest e-Commerce sites.
The Solution
inTIREnet, Canadian Tire’s Intranet solution consisting of over 15,000 unique sites, pages, documents, and images, is accessed by 4,500+ employees, and approximately 40 publishers. Originally built on legacy Lotus Notes technology, the system was migrated to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 and launched across the organization in June, 2008. Receiving not just a technical upgrade but also a look and feel refresh, the new inTIREnet is much cleaner, visually appealing, and more intuitive. Search, which was an issue with the previous platform, is also now much richer and very functional.
Where data governance was previously an issue, standard out-of-the-box functionality of SharePoint enables documents to appear on and expire from sites automatically without administrator intervention. Thanks to a clean site structure and clearly classified data, the site now offers easy navigation and rich search capabilities across a variety of document types.
Canadian Tire benefits from a progressive corporate culture of social networking, and the collaboration features of SharePoint meshed well with the environment. A highly functional People Search brings people, resources and information closer together, and the system has growth potential with Enterprise Search.
The Results
- Standardized style and look and feel
- Content authors throughout the organization trained and have taken ownership of their content
- Easy navigation and rich search capabilities for pages, documents, people, and dealers
- Standardized templates for sites and pages
- Live feeds from HRIS, Active Directory, facilities, mainframe Dealer systems, and TSX
- Easy web content management and security managed directly through the browser
- Significant reduction in paper-based communication
