Green Bay Packaging Solves Many Business Challenges with M365

Solutions and Results

Human Resources Group Solution

The Situation

When Rachel Juley – Senior Manager of Human Resources, Labor Relations, and Training – took her position in 2018, the Human Resources information was stored on an outdated corporate intranet site. It was difficult for the HR team and employees to find information, and it was missing the proper security to delineate information specific and appropriate to HR versus information available to all employees. Additionally, employees had to click through dozens of forms to find what they needed – navigating through content along the way that was not relevant to their needs.

The Results

Now with their new suite of SharePoint sites, Juley and the company’s HR managers have everything they need at their fingertips, and permissions ensure information is secure. In its simple interface, they can sort by permissions and metadata. “It’s been much easier for us to find what we need,” Juley said.

Juley had used SharePoint in the past as a backend project management system but seeing what it can do now exceeded her expectations. “It looks like a website,” she said. “It’s visually appealing and incredibly intuitive to use. How our HR site turned out was beyond what I could have imagined.”

Features include:

• New Employee and Human Resources homepage with easy-to-use global navigation
• Event registration forms and management tools
• New hire and exit employee surveys
• Topic-based communication sites for the following:
  • Corporate Training
  • Employee Engagement
  • Leave of Absence & Accommodation
  • Onboarding & Offboarding
  • Performance Management
  • Recruitment & Selection
• Custom search and filtering tool to allow content to be organized by topic, but visible to only those with permissions, as well as facilitate a great employee experience in locating documents

Up Next

With content for employees and HR Managers at each division easily accessible, HR next plans to expand the Corporate Training area by offering a SharePoint-based Events Registration solution. It will allow employees to search available training, view course information, and complete registration – all while allowing the organizers to manage attendees.

Fiber Resource Division Solution

The Situation

Brandon Tallant – a Forest Inventory Analyst for GBP’s Fiber Resource Division – spends a lot of his time in the field managing tracts of land and examining the growth of current tree crops on GBP’s more than 350,000 acres of owned and managed land. Land is managed and trees are grown like other farmed crops, benefiting from the attendant knowledge, data, and metrics common to modern farming practices, but the antiquated state of records and workflows did not allow the company to unlock modern data aggregation and analytics as it related to this crucial piece of its supply chain.

Until recently, if Tallant wanted to review data and decisions made about a particular tract of land or crops, he had to go to a back office and sort through paper files. If he couldn’t find what he was looking for on premises, then he would have to request it and wait for the documents to be scanned and emailed to him.

With the rest of the Fiber Resource Division in the same situation, the Management Team sought a way to quickly review what decisions were made and why, as well as leverage data analytics to improve performance and ROI, without being bogged down by manual processes. “The better access we could have to information, the better decisions we could make,” Tallant said.

Since Tallant and his thirty peers are geographically dispersed, they needed to consolidate their information, digitize it, and have easy access to it. Going paperless was the only way the division would be able to quickly make informed decisions.

The Results

“It’s hard to know where to go if you don’t know what’s possible,” Tallant said. He knew his division’s operations, and they listened to learn how they operated. The Core team then provided him with solutions to organize their information and process by topic/activity instead of department so his team could efficiently find what they needed.

Instead of organizing their information by folders, we enabled them to organize by metadata – which was a new concept to his team, but they quickly embraced it because it lets them better organize and find document types across particular pieces of land.

“Now we’ll be able to pull up to a tract and quickly determine what practices we implemented to get here. If the practices implemented yielded favorable results, we will quickly know which ones to replicate,” Tallant said. By centralizing his division’s information so they can access it remotely – as well as using SharePoint lists and alerts – he and his peers can quickly get the right information to the right people.

“Growing timber is a long-term investment. When I plant a tree today, I’m not going to harvest it for another 14-17 years. Five years down the road, we will be able to see how we got there. The faster we can analyze the results and see how we got them, the better we can make future decisions.”

Features include:

• Fiber Resource Home communication site
  • Central landing page for the division
  • On-call schedule and contact information displayed
  • Central location for divisional equipment information
• Timber Harvest communication site
  • Store all documents pertaining to harvest activities in a single document set for that harvest, along with metadata for document sets and documents, including being able to account for differences in metadata between GBP-owned land and land owned by private parties
  • Email notifications sent to users based on when specified document types were uploaded
  • Workflow to move uploaded W-9 documents to a different area, accessible only by Accounting
  • Custom search and filtering to search by set or specific document
• Silviculture communication site
  • Store all documents pertaining to the growing and cultivation of trees on a piece of land in a set, as well as documents that had a relationship to every piece of land managed
  • Custom search and filtering to search by set or specific document
• Purchasing communication site
  • Central location for division invoices
  • Automated invoice payment approval process
• Environmental communication site
  • Bring together all Environmental topic documents for an employee self-service experience and to facilitate audit requirements
  • Allow for permissions separation amongst documents

Up Next

Now that the Fiber Resource Division has reorganized their content from organization by “who is doing” to “what are we doing”, they next plan to look to digitize forms and look to process automation to further enhance their work processes.

Additional Solutions Include

Compliance Letter Automation

We leveraged Power Apps Form and Power Automate to automate what used to be a manual Customer Compliance Letter process for approximately 2,000 letters per year. The solution now allows self-service requests by division, which auto-generates the letter for quick and easy approvals. This solution saves them 4,500 hours a year in labor.