Improving the bottom line

There is certainly plenty of scope for an intranet to save money and some big savings to be made. In 2008 British Airways estimated it saved £55 million (Source: Norman Nielson Group). Here two practical suggestions for achieving real savings:

1) Integrate your Employee Directory with Active Directory

Work with IT to integrate your online employee directory with Active Directory (AD) so that employees details are automatically displayed from their AD login account. The employee directory should provide an update page so amended details are fed back to each employees AD account. Use this employee data as the central source of trusted data for ALL systems where employee data is stored.

2) Move systems and process online

Move as many systems and processes online as possible to create more efficient processes. Obvious starting points are HR and IT self service and knowledge bases/FAQs and but there are plenty of others: expenses, meeting room and webinar booking, purchasing, hot desk booking, parking space booking, online training course booking and e-learning systems (maybe part of HR system). They don't all have to be self service eg asset management and meeting room administration.


You can combine the two ideas above by using your captured employee data in pre-populated forms to save employees time when they use your online self service systems. So employees don't have to continually fill out their personal details when buying software, claiming expenses, booking a meeting room and viewing their payslip. etc. This results in removing a repeated chore for employees and additional time savings to those now more efficient online processes.