August 28, 2019
Acuity Brands is one of the world's leading providers of innovative lighting systems that include LED lighting, lighting controls & related products.
Business Challenge
- To retain its market leading position, Acuity Brands relies on continual innovation and new product development is key to the overall success of the business.
- Some manual processes hindered productivity. For example, the initiation process for new product development projects was cumbersome, requiring team members to manually create a new SharePoint site and often copy relevant project document templates and other assets from a base repository into the new site.
- In addition, the primary means of communication among project team members was email. This slowed productivity because staff members had to take time each day to manage their inboxes and because conversations were often disconnected from the related project assets. The project teams needed a better means to collaborate in a more efficient and effective manner.
- Acuity Brands wanted a solution that would make it easier for new product development teams to plan and manage their projects consistently, end to end, with management and executive visibility into the entire project portfolio, not just one project at a time.
Our Solution
- Intellinet worked closely with Acuity Brands to develop a new product development lifecycle system based on Microsoft.
Results & Impact
- With Microsoft Teams, Acuity Brands is able to integrate cross-functional teams across many business units by tying together communications, task management, and document management in one unified user experience.
- The solution leverages Intellinet's Microsoft Teams Accelerator (MTA) in order to dynamically provision new product development Teams, based on pre-defined Teams templates and Microsoft Planner plans. Proper governance, security, and consistency across the portfolio of active projects are managed via Teams using multiple layers of access and control.
- Since launching the new system, Acuity has compressed its product launch cycle time for its Commercial Lighting group by 20%, in part due to the massive adoption of the automated Teams technology that greatly streamlined project communications, daily management and oversight.
"Thanks to Intellinet's innovative use of Microsoft Teams, we automated critical parts of our innovation process, allowing our teams to focus more time and effort on value-added activities. Intellinet delivered the project on-time and within budget and they were true partners from design to implementation" - Tiago Khouri, Operations Director, Acuity Brands Lighting