The Multipharma Group is a leading pharmacy retail chain with headquarters in Brussels. It was founded as a cooperative more than 100 years ago and has grown steadily ever since with the mission to provide the population with the best healthcare products. Today, as the biggest pharmaceutical distributer in Belgium, their network includes 300 traditional and retail pharmacies, generating an annual turnover of €400 million.
The Challenge
- Rigid intranet platform
- Lack of flexibility for customizations
- Complex user experience
- Diverse audience profiles
- Dispersed, multilingual workforce
Multipharma’s intranet platform was far from meeting the requirements of a modern internal portal. The look & feel was no longer attractive and information was hard to navigate.
Even the authoring experience was hard to manage. Adding new content or updating existing pages was complex and required technical knowledge. Needless to say, the intranet was not responsive and managing two languages (Dutch and French) demanded some improvisation.
This resulted in an impersonalized, static intranet with limited updates. The difficulty to find useful information and inefficient cross-collaboration led to an overload of email communications. Ultimately employees just started turning away from the platform.
As Multipharma explored the options to revamp their intranet, three members of their IT and Internal Communications teams attended our workshop on next-generation intranets in Leuven, Belgium.
New Multipharma Intranet: Key Features
- Targeted news feeds with different updates depending on location
- Alerts and homepage notifications for live announcements
- Flexible site architecture that can be managed by the intranet owners
- Multilingual - Multipharma operates across Belgium, so bilingualism in Dutch and French is a must
- Interactive mega menu to organize the intranet portal navigation
- Office pages and store directory with general information and pictures about each point of sale
- Who’s who, the People Directory add-on and employee search engine
- Work documents and procedures with easy version control through SharePoint
- Event hub with calendar view and outlook calendar integration
- Powerful search engine easily accessible from every intranet page
- Branding & styling fully in line with Multipharma’s corporate identity, (fonts, logos, palettes, imagery, etc.)
Our goal was to offer all our employees a powerful and feature-rich digital workplace platform, and we got it with Amplexor and Valo. By empowering our staff, we believe our new intranet will add to better customer and patient experience, and better overall levels of service!
Christof Pelgrims
Internal Communications Coordinator, Multipharma
The Solution
After the workshop, Multipharma’s team was convinced a ready to go intranet was the way to go. With the ability to implement a new portal quickly while ensuring user adoption across their different departments and locations, Valo was the solid and future-proof intranet solution they were looking for. The Valo foundation provided a rich set of out-of-the-box features, but also opportunities to further customize the portal to Multipharma’s requirements.
Above all, a special requirement made by Multipharma had to be met: a separate homepage for people working at headquarters and for those working at network offices. We successfully provided a smart solution with content personalization. By registering a workplace attribute in the Active Directory, with function, service and location details, intranet news articles can now be targeted to specific groups of people.
More important than improving the way Multipharma’s intranet looked like, we changed its “feel”. Intranet managers, content creators and all employees gained the ease of use they needed.
We are proud of having been part of Multipharma’s transformation journey and we’re confident that with their new intranet, they’re well prepared to grow even further as pharmacy specialists.
Tom Laureys
Solution Manager ECM, Amplexor, an Acolad Company
The Result
- Increased employee engagement
- Centralized communication between headquarters and pharmacies
- Customized digital workspaces
- Less operational emails
Backed by Valo Intranet solution and our customization, the group’s new intranet acts as the backbone of communications both within and between all of the company’s locations, enhancing collaboration across teams.
The 1700 employees can access global company announcements, as well as receive personalized information according to their location, role and language of preference – all of the intranet content is available in the country’s two official languages, Dutch and French.
There’s also a news kiosk, a powerful people directory, a digital library and links to the group’s business tools and applications, such as the Multipharma training center. On the pharmacies’ homepage, staff get notified of everything that needs to happen in the store that day, active product promotions, returns information, delegate visits and much more.
With simplified collaboration being important for Multipharma’s growth strategy, their new intranet offers the perfect foundation for the group to sustain their market position.
