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In Our Own Words - Lagniappe Pharmacy Services New Jostle Intranet

3 min read

In Our Own Words - Lagniappe Pharmacy Services New Jostle Intranet

We emailed Kevin Conable a series of questions about his new intranet and he emailed us back some answers. Read on for what this VP of IT thinks about intranets and Jostle.

 

The interview

1. Tell us about your company - (what’s your purpose, where are you located? number of locations, number of employees, fraction who are remote or field workers?)

Lagniappe Pharmacy Services.

We are a pharmacy services company providing end to end hardware, software and support services for independent pharmacies nationwide. We not only sell and support hardware such as workstations, servers, network and peripheral equipment but also develop and maintain 7 different pharmacy application platforms.

We are based in Fort Worth, TX with offices in Pine Brook NJ, Hauppauge NY, Buffalo NY, Fresno CA, Columbia MD and Greensboro NC. Employee count is 205 and about half of the employees are located in our corporate office in Fort Worth. The remainder are in remote offices.

2. Tell us about yourself: name, title, and role in your intranet project.

Kevin Conable, Vice President of Technical Services. I am one of two primary sponsors for the project and responsible for the launch.

3. What prompted your company to look for an intranet?

Collaboration. Due to the disparate locations of our business, it was often difficult to understand how people and departments were structured and to provide a feeling of connection with coworkers and leadership. We also needed a way to distribute news and information on customers and to share documentation more efficiently (documentation was located in different places and was difficult to retrieve).

4. What technologies had you been using for employee communications and collaboration prior to Jostle?

Before Jostle, employee communications came through all-employee emails. 

5. Were there any special considerations your organization faced that influenced your choice of solutions (ie compliance, IT resources, security, mobile workforce, temporary workforce, or other challenge.)

Yes, we are a small company and resources are short so we needed a solution that was quick and easy to implement. We initially looked at 3 different cloud based intranet tools and found Jostle to be the most intuitive.

6. How was your experience deploying Jostle? Tell us about your launch.

The launch was very uneventful, just what you look for when implementing a tool as extensive as an intranet. The Jostle launch team provided all of the documentation and support we needed and we had very few issues across the entire company.

We also had 100% participation from our employees on week 1 and have averaged about 85% on average in the 4 months since then.

The Jostle team provided t-shirts and we put up posters and had snacks to make it a fun event. From a technical perspective, the AD import tool works really well and overwrites previous data which was nice to help clean up mistakes when preparing for launch. Also the org chart tool helped us see the entire organization and easily navigate departments and teams.

7. How did the arrival of Jostle impact your organization and/or it’s culture? Any big wins?

It was quite transformational.

We often struggled with communicating across remote locations and putting a face with a name outside of email. The Teams and People section of the site have been extremely helpful with collaborating with others and breaking down boundaries. We have received compliments from the executive team down to entry level employees on how effective the tool has been and in our organization this does not happen often.

The Discussions section has also been a big success for teams to collaborate on project work. 

8. Do you think about your future aspirations for an engaged workforce? Any thoughts you’d like to share?

I have managed many other intranet tools and this one is the most engaging without feeling like a social media tool. We would like to create more integration with other cloud based software products in our organization to create a single common portal for the company.

Thanks, Kevin

We appreciate the chance we have to get to know our customers this way. If you have ideas or questions for Jostle or Kevin, leave them in the comments section.

If you’d like to learn more about Jostle, visit our product page or get a demo.

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Jessica Hollander

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