Situation

General Mills is a leading U.S. and international manufacturer and marketer of consumer foods products, with worldwide sales of more than $7.9 billion annually. Major U.S. businesses include: Big G cereals; Betty Crocker desserts, side dish and dinner mixes; Betty Crocker and Nature Valley snacks; and Yoplait and Colombo yogurts.

We worked with General Mills to implement their first corporate Intranet. As a result of customer satisfaction with this project we were able to continue partnering with General Mills to develop business solutions for several different business areas.

Strategy

Work closely with internal resources to offer supplemental staffing and mentoring of internal staff to build and enhance the functionality of the General Mills Intranet through new application development and mentoring their development staff.

Solution

• Document Management – Integrated PCDOCs and Cyberdocs products with General Mills Intranet to provide enterprise-wide knowledge management.
• Salesforce automation – Showpiece application – Worked with a team of developers to build a Sales Force Automation tool that enabled OLAP analysis of sales data, sales forecasting, as well as measurements of sales goals. This application was used as a showpiece application and was demonstrated by Microsoft at the launch event for Internet Explorer 4.
• Innovation tools – Worked with research division responsible for development of new products and technologies to develop a cutting-edge Intranet site that functioned as a collaboration tool for internal research employees.
• Content Management tools – Developed several content management tools to automate new story rotation on the Intranet web site. This tool allowed corporate communications to more easily publish content and communicate to employees.
• Recipe database for custom and large volume orders – Built a recipe management and customization system that sales people were able to use in order to customize recipes to specific customer needs – typically bakeries and other food producers.
• Knowledge Base for developers – Web-enabled a knowledge management database that developers were able to use to share experience, best practices, and to collaborate within the enterprise.
• Sample tutorial applications – Worked with newly formed web team to build a sample applications to display and edit database entries. Built the first application in ASP as an example of ASP best practices. Extended the ASP application to use DHTML to make the application more efficient and teach the web team how to link ASP best practices with DHTML best practices.

Results

Increased effectiveness throughout enterprise by increasing efficiency of Intranet. Increased knowledge levels within General Mill by making documentation accessible to all employees.

Trained a new department on Intranet development best practices as well as new web development practices such as ASP and DHTML.

Efforts gained General Mills IT department national recognition as a leader in web development. As a result of this recognition General Mills was asked to demonstrate web-based application at the Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 launch event. This launch has been the most significant browser launch to date.