The client
William Grant & Sons is a renowned Scottish distillery founded in 1887. As a family-owned company, they are highly regarded in the spirits industry and distribute their premium products to nearly 200 global markets. Their notable brands include Glenfiddich Single Malt Scotch Whisky and The Balvenie.
The challenge
Simplify and centralise a web of complex legal workflows spanning over multiple teams, touchpoints, and review cycles.
The solution
A robust web application with governed workflows and globally understood procedures, all underpinned by SharePoint and Azure AD.
Understanding the problem space
William Grant & Sons’ legal team have ultimate responsibility for the company’s compliance and due diligence for functions such as new supplier onboarding, data protection, and anti-bribery and corruption. The team approached us as they were struggling to rationalise the processes that facilitated these important checks across spreadsheet forms, email, Sharepoint sites, and face to face conversations, to name a few.
The Single Entry Access Centre, or SEAC portal, would bring together the disparate processes and resolve some of the core pain points felt across the business including a lack of instruction, uncertainty over legal requirements, confusion around review cycles, and general negative perceptions about the effort and length of time these business-critical processes required.
Supporting compliance through design
The solution design had to reflect William Grant & Sons’ recent corporate brand refresh. As the primary brand colours were fairly deep, we maintained a modernity in the interface design by retaining the deeper coppers and purples in the header and footer areas while keeping the primary interface light. We utilised the brighter secondary palette in our form tagging and status indicators to try and draw the user’s eye to vital pieces of information.
From a UX point of view, we addressed many of the pain points uncovered through discovery via a personalised homepage, improved search and filter, a dynamic form generator workflow, and streamlined form data entry.
A technically robust platform
The solution was built using .NET technologies and is underpinned by SharePoint, making it simple to integrate with the SharePoint systems the legal team currently uses across the business. We also utilised William Grant & Son’s Azure AD infrastructure to power security and permissions, meaning that management of the portal and its users was simple.
Results
Following on from successful prototype and beta testing during development, the portal was launched internally and continues to be a core part of the compliance ecosystem. Our working relationship with William Grant & Sons has expanded beyond the SEAC portal, into further areas of business support including data visualisation, reporting, and BI functions.