PRIO is a Portuguese energy company founded in 2006. A pioneer in electric vehicle charging and domestic oil recycling, PRIO currently operates 250 gas stations in Portugal and Spain and is one of the largest biodiesel producers in Europe. Despite being a little over a decade old, PRIO quickly gained a considerable market share and expanded its activity thanks to a disruptive customer value proposition: “PRIO: the smart choice”.

PRIO had an on-premises SharePoint intranet that, despite well implemented, was showing its age: its interface was dated, and some key-functions were either lacking or accessible through an external service. Worst of all, save for a couple of links, employees rarely had a reason to use it. Rui Coelho, Head of Best Practices at PRIO, surveyed the market for a partner who could develop a new corporate portal with features that supported the company’s employees in their daily functions.

PRIO asked our team for a corporate portal with a strong emphasis on employee collaboration.

“We want our intranet to have a two-way communicational effect that facilitates corporate work.”

João Silva, IT Project Manager at PRIO Energy

The company had a list of must-have features, and our team proposed a few more aligned with PRIO’s vision for the portal. From day one, PRIO wanted an ever-evolving, ever-improving platform where functions are added as needs arise. Given its flexibility and integration with Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online was the only future-proof platform able to match that vision.

PRIO is a fast-growing company, and that became evident throughout this project. Retrieving some data was not as easy as expected, and the number of needs the new portal had to address kept growing, but everything went according to plan.

We delivered PRIO’s new intranet portal on the classic SharePoint Online experience with a custom theme and web parts by BindTuning, and the following functions and tools:

• News and events, both company and division-wide.
• Document archive, both company, and division-wide.
• Clients, suppliers, and materials’ registration tool.
• Vehicles and trips reservation tool.
• Expenses submission tool.
• List of company benefits and protocols.
• Port access request.

Because the modern SharePoint experience was still under development at the time, we took an intermediate step in migrating PRIO’s on-premises intranet to the classic SharePoint experience. A year later, with the Modern SharePoint experience fully established, PRIO agreed to migrate to it, providing its employees a better user experience while making sure the platform is future-proof and will take advantage of all new features for years to come.

This next step coincided with Maria Feliz Pereira’s arrival at PRIO. As the new Project Manager, Maria took over the portal. At the time, expenses, reservations, and IT were among the departments using the new intranet, but it was far from a widely used platform at the company.

After the switch to the modern SharePoint experience, adoption skyrocketed among PRIO’s departments. Maria was notable in this process since she maintained the site collections, but each team was responsible for adding information to their department’s site. Nevertheless, Luís Ribeiro, Tech Lead at the DevScope Portals team, was always available to assist PRIO with any technical aspects, such as the integration of BindTuning’s web parts.

Because the modern SharePoint experience was still under development at the time, we took an intermediate step in migrating PRIO’s on-premises intranet to the classic SharePoint experience. A year later, with the Modern SharePoint experience fully established, PRIO agreed to migrate to it, providing its employees a better user experience while making sure the platform is future-proof and will take advantage of all new features for years to come.

Luís also introduced an automated flow to PRIO’s expenses process. Whenever an employee submits an expense, their immediate superior is notified, and the administrator is cc’d. Once the superior approves the expense, accounting is notified to issue a reimbursement. The process is now safer and saves the company time by replacing manual signings. It also gives everyone control over their expenses since they can track the entire process throughout its different phases.

Another noteworthy endeavor was the comprehensive assessment of PRIO’s vast organizational structure that our team did with Maria’s help, which resulted in its move to the new portal, complete with all hierarchical and functional rules and conditions.

After the switch to the modern SharePoint experience, the portal became widely used and is now part of PRIO’s everyday life. It currently hosts over 30 websites created by PRIO employees with zero problems, and ideas for new ones spring up every day.

“The intranet is no longer a documents repository, but part of PRIO’s natural systems.”

Maria Feliz Pereira, Project Manager, PRIO Energy

Because the portal is an evolving platform, PRIO is looking to update a series of old processes that include receipts, canteen reservations, tax statements and data, holidays and absences management, and prepaid cards. This move will centralize a series of PRIO services scattered throughout external platforms by turning them into apps running natively on their new intranet portal while effectively making them available on a mobile format.

• Migrated an on-premises corporate portal to SharePoint Online.
• Updated it to the modern SharePoint experience.
• Built a set of custom web parts on top of SharePoint Online that integrated with SAP web services, providing employees a simple user interface to day-to-day tasks (expenses, car requests, etc.)

• SharePoint Online
• Microsoft Flow
• BindTuning Web parts

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