For Manufacturers 'Being Social' Nets Real Business Value

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Feb. 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The continued globalization of manufacturing requires companies to work harder than ever to connect and engage worldwide teams. Point solutions like email, instant messaging, texting, internal portals and even enterprise content management (ECM) systems, are not enough. These solutions, while effective at enabling one-to-one communication and limited knowledge sharing, do little to make employees feel they are an integral part of the community. According to business and IT solutions company ICC, this need for increased collaboration, communication, productivity and innovation is leading manufacturers around the globe to select an extensible and integrated collaboration platform for their global workforces. To help manufacturing companies learn how a collaboration platform can benefit them, ICC has outlined Five Ways Manufacturers Can Get Social.

(Logo:  http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20140219/NY67406LOGO)

To be more productive and innovative, employees need easily searchable access to the information, institutional knowledge, and expertise of other team members from across the organization -- regardless of where an employee sits or where the information resides. Point solutions do little to enable this level of knowledge-sharing and interaction. From a purely IT perspective, managing these separate applications can be troublesome and time-consuming.

"The beauty of an integrated collaboration platform is that you have the ability to push content, set restrictions to manage access, and create cross-functional teams all in one place. And these teams can come together in online communities and interact with each other in a way they couldn't before, all securely and in one view," says Scot Burdette, ICC Vice President of Strategic Accounts - Manufacturing. "So the idea is this ease of collaboration makes it feel like it's their company, as opposed to just their job."

This is why many manufacturers have turned to ICC and SharePoint for a solution. Like most industries, employees in manufacturing struggle to find the information and resources they needed to innovate at their jobs and be more productive. Collaboration solutions address these challenges by bringing together location-agnostic content management and search, corporate messaging and news sharing, team collaboration and communication, and project management into a single integrated platform.

Five Ways Manufacturers Can Get Social.

Manufacturers under pressure to enable increased collaboration, productivity and innovation should look into five ways an integrated collaboration platform can help them to "get social" in their organizations:

1. As a communication platform. By not limiting sharing to immediate team members, this type of platform enables anyone in an organization to find and reach out directly to another person across the global enterprise. This enables faster and timely knowledge sharing regardless of geography or time zones.
2. As a collaboration platform. By connecting people, information and the wide variety of available content regardless of where they exist, manufacturers can allow employees and partners to share and, perhaps more importantly, search for documents and other collateral regardless of where it resides. This can even include bringing together data from multiple sources to provide new perspectives that can expedite decision making.
3. By encouraging employee retention. When employees feel part of a community, they are more likely to develop loyalty and attachment to that community, which can lead to increased engagement in the brand and drive innovation. HR can then invest more time finding employees who can provide a strategic advantage to their organizations.
4. As a knowledge management and capture engine. One of the biggest challenges for organizations of any size is the ability to rapidly locate and effectively leverage the knowledge and vast information, both structured and unstructured, that is stored across the organization. By enabling employees to search and directly access the necessary information, regardless of device or location, manufacturers can overcome these obstacles.
5. As an innovation engine. Innovation requires open communication facilitated by easy access to the right people and information. This leads to a more agile organization better equipped to respond faster and more effectively in the face of relentless global change and competition.  This can result in lower cost, improved quality, improved customer service, and potentially new products or services.

"You can't grow a company if you're not working together as a team. You want to build a culture of collaboration that brings together information and corporate knowledge in one place and helps global employees feel more connected to one another and to the company leadership," says ICC's Joe Hartsel, Manager of Client Solutions for Portals & Collaboration. "That's why we use technology: to help people collaborate. The dynamic collaboration aspect is huge but it doesn't just happen. To get the big returns collaboration promises, companies need to develop a roadmap that exposes the true business needs and provides a strategy for tackling them."

Learn More: Download a complimentary copy of our white paper to learn how to develop a roadmap for planning, designing, and implementing a collaborative culture, "ICC Roadmap Framework for Business and IT Alignment" (http://bit.ly/1bWzMGe)

About ICC

ICC (Information Control Company), based in Columbus, Ohio, is a leading provider of enterprise technology solutions. With a staff over 500 highly trained consultants, we are experts in Strategy, User Experience, Visual Design, Engineering, Project Management, Business Analytics and Quality Assurance. Using these skills, we develop and deploy innovative, business-critical solutions that enable Fortune 500 and mid-market organizations to improve operational efficiencies. Our Business, Digital and Technology solutions give our clients a competitive advantage that helps them drive revenues and increase margin.

Clutch is a world-class digital ad agency inside the walls of ICC. Together, they're a collection of seasoned strategists, user experience specialists, writers, art directors and developers who specialize in the art and science of Interactive Conversations. 

ICC is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and an IBM Premier Business Partner. Clients include Nationwide, Cardinal Health, McGraw Hill, the State of Ohio, and Honda. ICC is committed to serving its clients, community and country by developing U.S.-based leaders who work hard to strengthen the American economy. More information is available at http://www.icctechnology.com.

Media Contacts:
Theresa Hodgson
ICC  
[email protected] 
614-523-3070 x106  
http://www.icctechnology.com/

Rich Mullikin
Communication Strategy Group for ICC   
[email protected]  
866-997-2424  
www.communicationstrategygroup.com

SOURCE Information Control Company