The Enterprise Challenge

SharePoint Employee Portal for a Leading Civil Engineering Product Manufacturer

The Reinforced Earth Company, a leading provider of retaining walls and geotechnical structures for heavy civil engineering projects, had completed more than 45,000 Mechanically Stabilized Earth walls using its proprietary Reinforced Earth and T-WALL systems since 1971. RECo’s workforce relied on product knowledge, assembly processes, and cross-team coordination to deliver complex civil engineering projects on schedule. Its existing intranet portal was designed to support that coordination – but it wasn’t doing it.

The portal suffered from two compounding problems. First, low usage: employees had collectively decided the portal wasn’t worth the effort to navigate, and had found workarounds for the tasks it was supposed to support. Second, irrelevance: the content that existed in the portal was outdated, the design was dated, and the functionality didn’t reflect how RECo’s teams actually worked. A portal that employees don’t use is not a collaboration platform – it’s an administrative liability.

The core gap was the absence of a feature that genuinely mattered to how RECo operated: an integrated product catalog that connected the product development team to the assembly team. Without a digital, searchable product catalog in the intranet, product and assembly teams communicated through email, spreadsheets, and informal channels – creating the kind of coordination friction that compounds on complex multi-site civil engineering projects. RECo engaged i3solutions to rebuild the portal from discovery through deployment, delivering a SharePoint employee portal that employees would actually use.

Strategic Trigger

The Portal Existed But Employees Had Voted With Their Behavior

The forcing function was measurable non-adoption. When usage data showed that employees were consistently finding workarounds rather than using the portal, the organization faced a clear choice: continue investing in a platform that wasn’t working, or rebuild it around what employees actually needed. The workarounds themselves were informative – the most common ones revealed the specific gaps that a rebuilt portal needed to fill.

The product catalog gap was identified as the highest-value opportunity. RECo’s business model depends on accurate, current product information flowing between product designers, assembly teams, and project managers. When that information lives in email threads and informal channels rather than a governed, searchable system, the coordination overhead compounds with every project. A product catalog embedded in the employee portal would replace the informal information flow with a governed, consistent source of truth for RECo’s proprietary product systems.

The employee directory gap was the second identified opportunity. RECo’s existing directory was a PDF – static, manually updated, and consistently out of date. A dynamic, searchable employee directory that reflected current org structure and contact information would replace a workaround-generating resource with a functional one. For context on how SharePoint portal governance decisions determine whether a rebuilt intranet maintains its adoption over time, Integration Governance for MicrosoftPENDING-SCHEDULED covers the change control architecture that prevents portal quality from degrading after launch.

Stakes

Operational inefficiencies drive overhead costs and slow project delivery

A lack of automated self-service means every internal query, form submission, and policy request funnels directly to the administrative and HR teams via email, phone, or in-person visits. This model introduces critical financial and operational strain. It requires over-resourcing administrative departments just to manage routine, low-value inquiries, inflating general overhead costs. Furthermore, the reliance on manual processing creates significant delays in fulfilling simple employee needs. This slows responsiveness to critical project requests, directly impacting the velocity of Reinforced Earth’s core engineering and construction operations and reducing overall billing efficiency.

Beyond immediate financial overhead, the reliance on ad-hoc, manual requests fosters a fragmented, opaque operating environment that presents severe strategic risk. When administrative workflows are managed through spreadsheets and individual email threads, the data is siloed and invisible to organizational leadership. This fragmentation prevents the collection of clean, structured usage data required for accurate operational analysis and resource planning. Without clear visibility into internal demand, leadership cannot effectively optimize departmental structures or anticipate future resource requirements, undermining long-term strategic growth and organizational agility in a competitive infrastructure market.

Constraints and Complexity

Product Catalog Integration, Custom Development, and Adoption as the Primary Success Metric

The product catalog requirement was the most technically specific element of the engagement. RECo’s product catalog needed to reflect the structure of its proprietary systems – Reinforced Earth and T-WALL – in a way that made sense to product designers and assembly teams simultaneously. Building a generic document library with product PDFs would have produced a marginally better version of the existing problem. Building an interactive catalog with the navigation logic that RECo’s teams actually used required close collaboration with the product and assembly teams to understand how they thought about the product portfolio.

Adoption was treated as a design constraint from the beginning rather than a post-launch concern. A portal that is technically functional but organizationally foreign – with navigation structures, content organization, and workflow patterns that don’t match how RECo’s teams actually work – will not achieve adoption regardless of how well it is built. Requirements gathering therefore included employee journey mapping that identified specific daily tasks and how the portal should support each one.

Selection Rationale

Microsoft Gold Partner with SharePoint Portal and Custom Development Depth

RECo selected i3solutions as a Microsoft Gold Partner since 1997 with a track record in SharePoint employee portal and Microsoft consulting services for organizations where adoption, not just functionality, was the primary success criterion. The Expert Delivery Model that i3solutions operates, with senior-level SharePoint developers handling every engagement, meant that the practitioners who designed the portal architecture were the same practitioners who built it – ensuring that the requirements-gathering insights translated directly into development decisions.

The Engagement Approach

From Ignored Portal to Operational Backbone

The four-phase approach. Employee journey mapping in Phase 1 was the investment that determined whether Phase 3 would build features employees used or features that looked good in a demo.

Technical Transformation

From Ignored to Indispensable

Before the rebuild, the RECo portal was a platform that existed in the IT architecture but not in the employees’ workflow. The product catalog was an email thread. The employee directory was a PDF. The approval workflows were informal. The portal was contributing nothing to how RECo’s teams actually worked.

After the rebuild, the portal hosted an interactive product catalog that connected RECo’s product and assembly teams through a governed, searchable system; a dynamic employee directory that replaced manual PDF maintenance; and approval workflows that converted email-based processes into governed, trackable digital flows. The SharePoint employee portal became the operational backbone it was designed to be.

The portal state before and after. A low-adoption, PDF-directory intranet replaced by a modern SharePoint employee portal with interactive product catalog, searchable directory, and automated workflows.

The Governance Readiness Ladder applied. The rebuilt portal delivered Level 3 governance. The SharePoint architecture supports Level 4 as Power Platform integration and analytics mature.

Measurable Outcomes

Portal Adoption Achieved, Product Catalog Live, Workflows Automated

Conclusion

A Portal Employees Actually Use

The Reinforced Earth Company replaced a low-adoption intranet that employees were working around with a SharePoint employee portal built around how RECo’s teams actually worked – featuring an interactive product catalog connecting product and assembly teams, a dynamic employee directory replacing the static PDF, and approval workflows converting email-based processes into governed digital flows. Through SharePoint employee portal and Microsoft consulting services that prioritized adoption as the primary success metric from the first requirements session, RECo moved from a portal nobody used to a platform that became part of daily operations.

Who This Engagement Serves