Company Profile

Duininck Companies is a family-run company, diversified in industries ranging from construction to manufacturing, from real estate development to distribution. Founded in 1926, and now in its third generation, Duininck Companies have strategically grown, capitalizing from its proven approach; leveraging the resources of a large company with the agility of independent operators. The company owns 9 independently operated family businesses.

Business Challenge

Duininck approached Alto with a number of goals to be achieved:

• To build and deploy their Intranet portal applications.
• To support their 9 companies with similar and unique needs.
• Provide for electronic document storage.
• Provide dashboard like reporting for Sr. Management in the form of graphs/charts, Crystal Reports, Excel Spreadsheets or other formats.
• Provide access to company forms and other information.
• Provide employee access to their payroll, AP payments, and other information.
• Post company news and announcements.

Alto’s Solution

Alto used Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create an intranet site for Duininck. The initial focus was on branding integrity and overall site hierarchy. Alto customized the look and feel of the intranet sites for Duininck Companies. Alto created the custom theme and master page layout based on Indian Harvest’s web site.

Indian Harvest, one of the Duininck Companies, also required an improved process for marketing projects that replaced high email traffic.  A separate site was created for the Marketing group to manage projects and track the people involved in the projects using SharePoint Calendar. The people tracker site was based on the Group Board Workspace template from Microsoft. The project workspace housed the documents and discussions on the marketing department’s welcome page. The calendar was color coded to replace the current calendar that was being manually maintained in Microsoft Excel.

Resulting Benefits 

o        State of the art intranet, that maintained brand integrity of each of the 9 companies.

o        Maintaining brand integrity made it easier to differentiate between them while increasing user buy in for the intranet.

o        Elegant solution for the Marketing department that put documents, discussion and project tracking at their fingertips and reduced email traffic and confusion.

o        Enhanced searching capabilities were a bonus.

Technologies Used

• Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
• Microsoft SharePoint Designer
• Microsoft SQL Server 2005
• Microsoft Internet Information Server
• ASP.net