The situation is alleviated by the tools that help you not to drown in the sea of work-related information. Modern IT solutions can consolidate company news in one place and show you personalized content, arrange all project documentation like a super-experienced archivist, and remind you about a corporate event tomorrow and an important tender the day after tomorrow. 

Examples of such saviors are solutions based on SharePoint technologies customized for unique customer needs. 

Read the article to learn about the stories of 3 Ukrainian companies that not only made the life of their employees significantly easier but also increased the efficiency of numerous processes.

• Astarta-Kyiv, an agricultural holding which daily creates a common corporate culture for more than 6,000 employees thanks to a single corporate Intranet portal (read more about SmartPoint Intranet at the end of the article). 
• Avalon, a leading investment and development company in Ukraine, which realized that, with up to 10 construction projects in progress at the same time, it is critical to structure all project documentation. And so, it implemented this task using SharePoint technology. 
• SMART business, that, in addition to the basic Intranet functionality, enjoys the use of its own inventions: calendars of internal and external events, the museum of merch presenting branded items from all 12 years of the company’s existence, as well as seamless integration with SMART HCM & LMS – a solution for effective human capital management.

Unified corporate culture for agro industry leader ASTARTA 

ASTARTA manages more than 220 hectares of land, the company’s sugar factories process 36 thousand tons of sugar beet per day, which makes it the number one sugar producer in Ukraine. The total livestock of cattle is 22 thousand heads, and the capacity of the biogas complex is 150 thousand m³ of biogas per day. And this is not an exhaustive list of the agricultural holding’s areas of activity.

A large staff is needed to service this scale. For example, during the season, the number of employees reaches almost 6 thousand people. The workers are in 7 regions of Ukraine, some of them are literally in the fields. Therefore, maintaining unified corporate values at ASTARTA is not a trivial task. The management aimed to unite all employees of the company in a single information field, to provide quick and convenient access to programs and services, and, as a result, to strengthen the corporate culture. 

SMART business offered a solution based on Microsoft SharePoint technologies, which made it possible to: 

• See all company news filtered by thematic sections.
• Get quick access to corporate and reference materials.
• The top management is now able to promptly inform about important personnel changes via notices on the main page of the portal.
• People started getting to know about the birthdays of colleagues 2 days in advance (and, believe us, this is a big improvement for the corporate atmosphere, because everyone is pleased when their holiday is remembered), 
• The portal has become a repository for corporate photos and videos.
• Organizational structure was implemented, because in such a large holding it is easy to get confused about “Who manages whom?”.

Besides, integration with the 1C Enterprise ERP system was carried out, so now any personnel changes are instantly displayed in the organizational structure on the portal, and information about colleagues can be found in a few clicks. 

Oleksandr Voynalovych, Chief Information Officer of ASTARTA, describes the holding’s need in a corporate portal as follows: 

“My dream is that we at ASTARTA start the morning not with a coffee, but with the corporate portal. For each employee, this is the so-called gateway to the world of the company. Therefore, for the HR and IT teams, the portal is an interesting and at the same time complex project, because we understand its importance and the fact that it cannot be a sustainable product but must constantly increase the number of useful features for users and become interactive. 

The choice of Microsoft SharePoint for the implementation of the portal was a very successful decision, it is suitable for the implementation of all our plans for the portal and information needs, and also enables to integrate other products of the Microsoft Office 365 system.”

Tons of corporate documentation of a Lviv’s developer Avalon 

Since 2014, Avalon has been developing and constructing modern architectural objects in Lviv. As a rule, a company runs 8-10 active projects at different stages at the same time, so it is easy to imagine what kind of documentation arrays employees have to deal with.

Avalon needed a solution that would organize corporate documentation. So that, relatively speaking, even a newcomer in the company, after a short induction, could easily find a specific project for a specific apartment, even in an architectural object of 2015. All the heavy documentation for AutoCAD had to “hang in the cloud” and be available to employees at any time and from any device. Also, Avalon set the goal of using Microsoft technologies as the developer had already used the solutions of this vendor and was quite satisfied. 

Considering all the requirements for building the document flow, SMART business offered a solution based on a Microsoft SharePoint portal, which has direct integration with Teams. 

This solved the problem of unordered files and documentation. A pleasant bonus of using the technology was that employees who work remotely or are at a presentation can show the project to investors in real time. Now every employee has access to files from any device and from any location. 

Also, the SharePoint portal is synchronized with the on-premise company resources. This makes it easier to work with “heavy files” and architectural software such as Autodesk Revit or AutoCAD. 

Not only employees but also contractors have access to company files. Avalon can be confident in the security of the solution because the SharePoint platform already has versioning, and the portal is synchronized with the on-premise resources – that is, if necessary, you can always turn to the local versions. The solution provides for multi-level settings of access rights and various user roles. 

Anton Shamov, Head of IT Department of Avalon, comments on the project’s ROI:

“We wanted to keep up with the times, so we provided project teams with a folder structure in which all project-related documents were organized according to a specific methodology. The SMART business team immediately understood our business need and completed the project in 4 months. According to our calculations, Avalon will receive a return on investment in less than six months.”

Anastasiia Davydova, Chief Commercial Officer of Avalon, comments on how the company managed to start saving time after portal implementation: 

“Our company closely monitors all innovations and technologies in the global community. Now, when the entire business is digitizing its internal processes, in the era of global digital transformation, the introduction of new software allows us to adapt as quickly as possible to any changes in the market, keep up with the times, organize the work of teams within the company as efficiently as possible, which means faster development and saving the most valuable resource in the modern world, which is time.”

SMART business – best testers of the corporate portal solution 

No one can tell about the goal and basic requirements for the portal better than a person who creates a corporate culture within her own organization – Natalya Onyshchuk, a Managing Partner of SMART business:

“It is very easy for me to talk about the corporate portal at meetings and presentations because I myself am its regular user. When creating the SMART Intranet product, we imagined the environment that will tell our colleagues everything about SMART business: what values we uphold, what traditions we have and who supports them, with which technological systems we work, what solutions are our own development, in which countries our offices are located and who our heroes are. Newcomers can easily get a feel for the corporate spirit, even if they choose to work remotely. And existing employees in a matter of minutes can read the company’s news, ranфging from receiving international awards by the company to the birth of a son of a colleague from a neighboring department.

It is also important to note that various fragments of the portal can be created in accordance with the customer wishes and in line with the brand book.

At a time when hybrid work is becoming more popular, building a corporate culture is becoming more difficult. After all, colleagues can see each other only via video conferencing or in the email addressees for months. At this moment, a unified corporate portal certainly helps a lot. If we work online, why not bring people together with common values online, too?”

If you got interested in creating a corporate portal, we invite you to learn more about it here — sales@smart-it.com

Small business and service industry

In 2019, the foodservice market volume in Ukraine counted approximately 50,000 places. Most of them could not reorient themselves to delivery or takeaway.

According to Poster, approximately 2,500 restaurants and other places stopped working during the first two weeks of the quarantine, which counts 63 percent of all their clients. If to view this percentage from the perspective of the total number of cafes and restaurants in the country, it will show that approximately 30,000 places are not working now.

For the period from March 23 to March 29, sales of the food services in Ukraine are 73% lower than they were for a similar period before the quarantine.

The drop is shown not only in Kyiv (78%), but also in such administrative centers as Lviv (78%), Kharkiv (73%), Dnipro (65%), and Odesa (60%).

About 160,000 people have lost their jobs in the restaurant business. Among the Poster clients, more than 13,000 people got laid off.

Housing market declines

According to the Dobovo service, rental prices have fallen by about three times. For example, if a 25-square-meter apartment in Kyiv on the Baseina street, has previously been rented for ₴1,200 ($44) per day, now most of the rooms in Partner Guest House is given to the longtime rent for ₴7,000-8,000 ($255-295) per month.

Taxi industry

The number of orders in the Bond taxi service, working in Kyiv and Odesa, declined almost three times, according to the service founder Petro Obukhov. The prices do not change, but the 10% discount is included automatically because of the low number of cars available.

Judicial system

During the quarantine in Ukraine, about 5,000 court sessions were postponed. There is a legal option to conduct them online, but the mechanics for this are not prescribed.

Some cases are postponed for an indefinite period; others are offered to hear without the participation of the parties.

Unemployment increases   

According to the data by the Union of Ukrainian Entrepreneurs, 1/3 of business owners (mostly microbusinesses) report about 90-100% income decrease since the quarantine started. 50% of the staff of the same entrepreneurs got laid off.

The medium and small business owners report about a 25-50% income decrease in comparison to the pre-quarantine period. They fired 10-25% of their employees.

Big companies lose 10-25% of their income, predicting 25% of workers to be laid off till the end of the quarantine.

According to Work.ua, for two weeks, the number of job openings decreased by 1.8 times in general, and 2.5 times for newly-published positions for two weeks. The number of companies with available job positions showed a 25% decline.

The authors of the rating point out that the evaluation was carried out according to the adapted methodology of the World Bank based on a survey of domestic entrepreneurs. 1317 companies throughout Ukraine took part in the evaluation. The focus of the study was six areas of interaction of business with the government, namely: the enterprise creation, the payment of local taxes; obtaining building permits; registration of land parcels for the property; connection to the power grid, quality of electronic services.

Vinnytsia region took first place in the ranking, gaining 334 points out of 600 possible. The highest marks in the region were obtained by the criteria of creation of a company, registration of a land parcel and connection to the power grid. The lowest mark was obtained for the quality of electronic services. The first three rankings also included Ivano-Frankivsk (332 points) and Zhytomyr regions (313 points).

“If we leave the positive dynamics aside, the Ukrainian regions have two global issues. The first is the electrical connection. By this criterion, Ukraine ranks 128 in the world.  The situation has worsened in all the regions over the past year. The second issue is equity of participation, which has acquired a corruption component and became a kind of a “stop sign” for investors (especially foreign ones) in the construction industry,” – comments Elena Shulyak, head of the Construction sector, BRDO, vice president of the SUP.

The authors of the rating gave recommendations to the regional authorities:

• To introduce electronic provision of permits and approvals by joining national e-services systems or by developing a local equivalent
• To ensure transparency of urban planning documentation, making it accessible for all users
• Join the #StartBusinessChallenge initiative
• Reduce the size of the contribution payment to the infrastructure to zero
• Accelerate the process of registration of land parcels for building the power lines