Pearl and Dean Choose Transparity for Improved Collaboration

About Pearl & Dean

Pearl & Dean is the only truly independent cinema advertising contractor in the UK. Representing a wide range of cinemas, with multiplex chains offering landmark locations throughout the UK.  

Wide Eye Media, a sister company to Pearl & Dean, is the main multi-platform cinema advertising company in Ireland. It delivers interactive, high-impact advertising campaigns using a variety of digital solutions across 643 screens in 93 locations. Wide Eye Outdoor, having evolved out of Wide Eye Media, is a dynamic Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) Solution Provider. They are experienced in helping maximise impact, engagement and flexibility for their clients.  

As a Group the organisations were ready to embrace Office 365 and new modern technology, to move their documents and communications into the cloud. They decided to improve their business by adopting Microsoft Teams. 

The challenge

The group engaged with us to share their pain points, many of which are common to lots of modern organisations: 

• Staff had difficulty accessing documents on the move or from home, with VPN causing a range of issues. 
• The number of documents had grown exponentially, leading to lost documents, lots of time being spent trying to find things, duplicate documents and poor version control. 
• Critical client and internal emails were being mixed with unimportant communications, with email overload impacting users. 
• Staff didn’t have a collaborative platform to help them share content across the business. 

The teams knew that they could improve their business by working better together. This meant being able to share documents and communicate in a more efficient way.

To do this, a range of improvements were identified: 

• Cleanse current file shares and move them into the cloud in a logical way 
• Improve communications and reduce the overload of email by providing a separate platform for internal messaging 
• Provide a solution that is scalable to avoid delivering too much functionality in one go 
• Improve confidence and user adoption through consultancy and training 
• Improve collaboration across the Group. 

As employees were located across the UK and Ireland, it was critical to ensure that all teams were included in decision making to ensure that all 3 organisations could continue to work most efficiently. 

The solution

We have developed standard methodologies for our Office 365 engagements and used our document management expertise to fully consult, build and train.

The key factors of this project consisted of: 

• Initiation to bring key parties together and introduce the benefits of Office 365, in what we like to call “Microsoft Teams & SharePoint: The Art of the Possible” 
• Consultancy and Requirements Engineering – meeting with individual to showcase the new technologies and get a full understanding of their specific needs 
• Governance with the identified Site Administrators and Champions to set rules and regulations for system usage and formulate strategies to ensure that the system continued to be reviewed and improved 
• Build of the solution with a high level of User Acceptance Testing 
• Face to face End User Training to ensure an equal level of knowledge was shared amongst all organisation staff, helping with increased user adoption and confidence. Followed up with Microsoft Teams Training Videos to keep the knowledge available. 

The outcome

We provided approximately 45 hours of onsite consultancy split between 20 sessions to gather feedback and requirements from over 50 employees representing all areas of the business.   

We configured 24 Teams and nearly 120 Channels, including some private channels. Additional Libraries with the use of added metadata were provided for the control of formal documents, such as contracts and policies, and added as Microsoft Teams Tabs for ease of navigation.   

This resulted in a much better ability to organise documents, vastly improved remote access, and reduced email clutter. 

All employees in the business were provided with face-to-face training at their place of work. This totalled 20 hours of training with additional training videos uploaded to Microsoft Stream for continued use.