Corporate portal. What is it? What for? Who and when?

What is it?

Let's first understand the concept of "Corporate Portal". Too often it is confused with the "Corporate Site", but you need to clearly understand the difference. Wikipedia tells us:

Corporate site is an online resource containing complete information about the company, its services / products, events in the life of the company, the history of development and much more.

But:

Corporate portal is a web-based interface that provides employees with access to corporate data of the company.

In other words, a corporate portal is your “virtual office” that allows your employees to exchange information, documents, add, change, delete, and most importantly work together. But it is in a general sense.

In fact, corporate portals provide a variety of specific functionality for business needs. Some companies independently develop an individual and unique corporate portal for work (but this is not cheap, to put it mildly), but you can take a ready-made solution and customize it to your own specifics.

Why do we need a corporate portal?

Why do you, the owners of companies need it. Let's look at the benefits of corporate portals?

The first is that we receive a system for storing and organizing all the important information about customers . We control incoming customer requests. If it's easier, then you receive letters, calls, requests from the site, messages on social networks and instant messengers. These can be bids from your new or existing customers, offers from your suppliers and partners. (All this has the name LYDA). To begin with, all this information needs to be collected, stored and it is desirable to classify. Then analyze and use, for example, to identify the most effective advertising sites. Bitriks24 automatically collects all LIDs from different sources into a single database: LIDs are collected from corporate emails, the “open lines” system, phone calls, chat rooms and web forms of your sites and a whole bunch total (talk about it in other articles).
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What for? In order for your employees to stop getting sick when they remember what they were communicating with a client from VibER, Mail or Online consultant on the site. Your employees have access to this information from any place where there is internet, they can enter the portal even from the phone. You do not need to install any additional software on the computer, the employee will simply start the workday - he came, sat at the table, connected to the corporate portal and that's it, he is ready to work. All your employees (even if they work in different offices) can get quick access to information and communicate with each other.

The second is in order, but not by importance for your company, but specifically for the sales department - this is the CRM system of customer relationship management . That is, after the application arrived, your manager needs to perform a series of actions before the client pays.

For example: You are a travel agency. You received a request from the site “I want to go to Turkey.” Your manager should contact the client and clarify the information (the client’s name, what dates he needs a tour, how many people will travel, how many stars the hotel should have, etc.). Then he must form a commercial offer (perhaps not one), send it to the client.

It is advisable to set yourself a reminder in 4 days "Call Pavel Semenovich and find out what tour he has chosen." If the customer resists, then give him a discount of up to 10%. If you agree to everything, then draw up and send him a contract, insurance and invoice. In the end, you must save copies of signed documents and wait for payment.

Such a sequence of actions in a company is called “Business Process”. You actually have a lot of such processes and it would be nice if some of them would be automated (for example, the formation of a document Commercial proposal)

Why do you need CRM? In order not to lose a single client (you can’t even imagine how much you have already lost, simply because the manager didn’t call back in time). In order not to teach the new manager how to work, and what would he clearly understand what to do. In order for you to have complete information about the client and you could, for example, based on it, sell something. What would happen when an employee leaves you could easily transfer his clients to another manager, since you have the entire history of working with these clients. Why do you need business process automation? It's simple. If many routine actions are performed automatically, then your employees do not spend time on this, then it turns out to work faster and they can process more customers and respond more quickly (compared, for example, with your competitors). And this is beneficial both in terms of sales and in terms of the overall image of the company.


The third is a task management system and project . Any even modest business consists of tasks and subtasks that need to be assigned to certain individuals and completed before a certain time. Frequently recurring sequences, such as invoicing for payment or sequential approval of contracts or coordination with all managers of a vacation application, can be automated. At the same time, a corporate portal needs to require a convenient and intuitive (visual) interface for managing and controlling all tasks, assigning roles to tasks (Who is responsible? Who helps? Who just watches?), Simple monitoring of task deadlines with reminders, grouping tasks by project , the presence of regular tasks that are set, for example, once a month or a quarter.

What for? If you are engaged in net sales, this system can speed up the internal processes of the company (for example, the task to the support department to purchase office supplies or the task to the IT department to install a monitor for a new employee, etc.). If you are a manufacturer, that is, you are releasing a certain product (material or software), then you need such a system as air. Your income directly depends on how much your employees use the project management system. And in general, without it, you will be drowned in sticky yellow pieces of paper, outfits and reports.

The fourth . And of course, the final big block - Control and Analytics . The larger the company becomes, the harder it is to control employees. You should be able to get statistics on the effectiveness of each employee. How many calls? How many completed tasks? How many overtime hours?

Also, your department heads should be able to analyze the performance of the department. As long as you cannot calculate the company's performance in numbers, you cannot develop. The corporate portal, in turn, should allow to build reports on the most diverse parameters and to do it simply and clearly.

Why do you need it? To improve labor discipline first. How much time does the employee spend at work? How effective is it? What percentage of his applications become your customers? Secondarily, to identify thin spots. Sometimes you do not even know at what stage the implementation of projects and sales is hampered. And thirdly, to determine the development strategy of your company. But there is a nuance - all analytics in the corporate portal is relevant only when all the necessary personnel work through it.

Who and when?

Who needs a corporate portal? Practically any sphere of activity (trade, production, medicine, provision of services, etc.), in one way or another, creates an information system around itself. For example, all sales managers receive applications by telephone and mail. Between themselves, exchange information via Skype. Approve contracts and statements with the boss in paper form. Naiads get into the production department also in the form of pieces of paper. Recall and task lists every good employee wears in his phone. A customer base, at best, in 1SK, with which not everyone can work, at worst, but often the database is generally in Excel plates. And the chiefs of callers carry you reports with unverifiable data. If you recognize yourself and your company in these examples and understand why this is bad, then you need the Corporate Portal and you are ready to implement it.

And the most terrible question is when it is needed and where to start? You need to start by identifying, fixing and standardizing the most important business processes for your company. Most likely, everyone now does your job not according to some general instruction, but because he can and how he does it (albeit not always well), so you need to write and preferably draw flowcharts of all important business processes of the company . Why is it necessary to do before the introduction of a corporate portal? Simply, if this is not done, then everything will be repeated again, and your employees will work “who is in the forest, who is on firewood”. And how, with such a scheme of work, introduce and train a new person? No Therefore, the standardization of business processes in the first place, then the instructions for working with the portal, and only then can you install a corporate portal.