Kelly-Moore Paints, a paint manufacturing and retail company headquartered in San Carlos, California needed to replace their legacy Intranet with a modern, centralized, easy-to-use hub for their 1,400 employees.

Chief Information Officer, Jim Maul, searched for a solution to solve these issues. After an extensive, two-dozen vendor RFP process, Maul selected MangoApps for its consolidated platform, free-flowing communication, and multi-faceted functionality.

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In this video, you will learn how Kelly-Moore Paints used MangoApps to:

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1. Improve employee efficiency with a centralized information and knowledge hub
2. Increase the level of communication between field sales employees and the corporate office
3. Encourage a cohesive and inclusive company culture

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Full video transcript:

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Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“Kelly-Moore Paints was founded in 1946 by Mr. Kelly and Mr. Moore and manufactures premium quality paints. We have about 150 stores in the Western states and just shy of 1400 employees. We focus on the professional painter and everything that they need to apply their trade.

The platform that we were on was over 10 years old, and it was just due for replacement, so we looked at what we wanted to accomplish with the intranet and decided that just replacing it, just upgrading it with similar technology wasn’t going to get us what we wanted to achieve. We wanted to improve not just the availability of information at Kelly-Moore, but also to improve the communication and collaboration across the company, and most importantly, to provide communication back into corporate. The legacy of Portal was primarily a one-directional feed out to the field. With MangoApps able to envision communication both out to the field and back up into corporate.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“KM Live itself was meant to represent kind of the new way to communicate and collaborate within Kelly-Moore, bringing people together, fluidity of information. If you do see, if you can show the logo eventually on the screen, a paint drop that’s not only a representation of our company, but it’s also the representation of the fluidity of the conversation, of everything kind of being found in one place. That was the thinking behind that. And bringing really things to life that may be historically buried in faxes or file folders into this new tool was one of the objectives.

You name the tool, and we were probably using it, so one of our biggest challenges was the multitude of tools that we had in place. Departments would get used to the certain communication channel, some of it was driven by the customer needs, and some of it was driven by established legacy systems including email, instant messaging, and so on, so our goal was to optimize that communication and bring everything together in one place through something that MangoApps was able to offer to us, and we do have a road map today to tackle every single one of those, what we call, legacy channels for communication and bring into KM Live as much as possible.”

Ryan Arakaki, Director of Marketing:

“It’s definitely going to change the way that I work at Kelly-Moore. For us, a lot of challenges we have is communication, sharing documents, collaborating on projects, so we didn’t really have a tool to do that with KM Live, it’s given us that platform.”

Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“It best matched the kind of multifaceted capability that we were looking for in a tool, not just to present information, but to present it in such a way that made it easy for an employee to find what they were looking for, to build and navigate seamlessly across people, information, communications, announcements, and have it all there for them to find delivered to them personally. The biggest difference between the old platform and the new is the fact that the old platform was a static platform that presented itself the same way to everybody. With Mango, we’re able to present information to the individual for what they’re interested in and for what they need, and that’s a huge change in the way we communicate and work as a company today.

We learned in our selection process, we had five finalists that we took forward as a proof of concept into an evaluation process, and what Mango demonstrated was not only a well thought out product, but the flexibility to work with us to tailor and incorporate our feedback into their product. And so not just in the selection process, we’re able to make some changes to the product, but also before going live, we were able to incorporate a number of enhancements that we felt would really make a difference between how we would launch it and how we would really change the way Kelly-Moore looked at and used the tool, and that was a big element for Kelly-Moore.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“What we were looking for is a place where not only you can store information in one place, but you can easily index it and search for it when you need to. So productivity train, where we were before, was something that we did not want to experience in the future, and MangoApps offered us the opportunity to store it in one place and quickly search for it, so when we are talking about finding an HR form, that used to take five minutes, if you had the knowledge, maybe a little bit less. Now it’s literally just three keystrokes and enter away.

A unified approach to the solution. So we were not looking at just kind of searching or storing a document, there was more about what we wanted to do. It was the communication, private messaging, instant messaging, group messaging, commenting, and engaging in various forms, and we are looking for simplicity, and intuitiveness of the tool.

Not every tool was as mature in this space, and MangoApps offered a truly unified approach that means less training for employees, introducing new module, we knew it was essentially the same thing as what they already knew in the previous one.

Another element was the fluidity and the approach to the solution, so MangoApps was very current and aware of what’s happening in social media and social enterprise. They were not necessarily bogged down by the legacy, “This is how we used to do it and you need to have a specific structure.” So we really much appreciate MangoApps having the flexibility into the solution, willing to work with us, and us, being medium sized business, it’s sometimes hard to find a partner that really truly listens, and MangoApps demonstrated it from the beginning to the end, from the engagement in pre-sales all the way through the project, and now when we are in production.”

Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“From a day one go live perspective, we’re thrilled with what we’re able to put out in the field. The feedback has been very positive. It was a very big change for Kelly-Moore, so we had the support from Mango behind us as we went live and made some adjustments to that first month of go live, and I’m very happy with where we are today.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“As far as people logging in, today, we have 95% of all employees actually logging in. If you are talking about the first week or two, we were immediately hovering around 80, 90% in the first couple of weeks. Just logging in, using the tools, that adoption was growing immediately and really the pressure was on us to provide a content to keep it relevant for people to come back.

The tool was so easy to understand the concept of, again, the communication kind of set up the stage, that the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, almost unrealistically positive. And in my mind, I don’t see it in many projects like this.

We went through, so after we identified our requirement documents, we look at the industry, what is happening out there, so we did talk to industry experts, we did our own research, we talked to our peers, our vendors, and out of that list, we had 20 potential vendors. We quickly narrow it down again, bouncing against our requirements and ended up with five, eventually four, some of the traditional names, some of the newcomers like MangoApps that we actually did much deeper dive into.”

Christine Goldsmith, Director of Learning Development:

“I love it. It’s great. So it’s the ability to access it wherever I’m at, whenever I need to, so if I want to just check in and see what’s going on, I can just quickly get to that information, and then if I want to look at something in a larger scale, I can easily do it on the computer as well and on the iPad, so there’s a lot of convenience in the portability.

The features that I really enjoy the most is the ability to make an announcement that would go out company wide or kind of elect a group that you want to target your message to, and really just then create the content that will meet the needs of the audience and be able to insert images if we want to, insert video if we want to, really just craft the message in the way that might be more meaningful to the target audience.

Before, we were communicating a lot through email, and so email, it was a little bit more of a sterile message, and I find that through KM Live, I actually am able to liven things up a little bit. The ability to add some, I guess, more visual interest to our messaging really kind of I think helps the impact.”

Ryan Arakaki, Director of Marketing:

“Some of the features that I like the most in KM Live is the search function. When I need to make an announcement or communicate a program or a promotion with the field, a lot of times over time, if it’s an evergreen promotion, that information gets lost. If it’s an annual promotion, that information will get lost, but with the search function, anytime someone comes in, whether they’re new to the company or maybe new to the position, they can find the documents that they need. So the search is key.

What I like most about KM Live is it’s a one-stop shop for everything that I need to work on a project. I can load files, files live there, ask questions, collaborate, and everything remains in one location. So now when we work within KM Live, the response time is a lot quicker. The time we save having to repeat feedback that we get from one group and sharing that with another group is gone because everything’s right there, so it’s a lot quicker, a lot more efficient. When we add people to a project, the onboarding, we don’t have to bring people up to speed because everything is there.”

Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“Communication was absolutely the number one. Getting information out to the field, not just policies and procedures, but also information to help us execute better. Communicating and coordinating our sales promotions, announcing changes in HR and benefits, communicating events that occur within the industry, announcing employee changes within the company. Anything you can think of now, KM Live powered by MangoApps is our primary communication channel for communicating out to the company, and we’ve never had a single tool that we’ve been able to leverage like that before. Even with email, that reached only about a quarter of our employee bags. KM Live touches everybody.

Historically in the stores, not every employee in the store would have an email account, but within KM Live, every employee does, so we’ve already quadrupled our touch points out to the field and to every employee by giving them not just the ability to receive information, but the ability to communicate back up to those that are creating the information. So if we announce a new promotion or we announce a change, any employee across Kelly-Moore has the ability through KM Live to provide feedback and comment on the success of that program or to provide feedback and improvements for that program next time around, so it provides this continuous feedback loop and the ability to communicate up and down the chain rather than just communicating out in one direction, and that’s a huge change to the way we work in the culture at Kelly-Moore.”

Christine Goldsmith, Director of Learning Development:

“I think KM Live definitely has helped really kind of augment what we’ve been doing in terms of communication. I think with any program or training initiative, it’s really important to be able to communicate what we’re doing and to do it in a channel that’s easy for people to access and to be able to understand, so it’s really helped us in terms of providing us an additional channel that we can let people know what’s going on and you know what they can expect, and it really promotes communication. In terms of viewing some of the conversations on there, it’s great to see that employees are asking questions and answering questions, really helping each other out, so there’s a lot of knowledge sharing that’s going on and really kind of that sense of community as people are able to turn to each other to help each other out, so that’s been really encouraging to see.”

Ryan Arakaki, Director of Marketing:

“When we start a project, I can just kick it off with a message to our team, loading up files or images that I have, then we can start talking about it. Before, it was mostly done in an email or in person, but this way, once we initiate the conversation, everything that happens with the project feedback I get from my team or others is all captured in that one thread.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“Most of the corporate announcements, again, are targeted at the stores, and we did have a portal and intranet before. It was actually brought in for the stores, and we would post most of the information on the portal over there, and with minimal ability to audit the viewability or whether it’s effective, it was essentially just one way communication. Put it on the portal, hopefully people read it and take action on it. The difference now is we can still do that, we still do the announcements through the portal, now it’s MangoApps slash KM Live. We now have interaction. So as we post something that is live, there’s comments, there’s questions, makes the documents or announcement better. It’s just much more engaging form of announcement than it used to be.

When you look at the retail employee, they become more of a consumer of information, so when we create elements of KM Live and documents and forms and so on, they are usually targeted at the retail employee. 80% of our, or 75% of our employees are in the retail store, so pretty much most of that information that is generated is targeted at them.

The third type of worker is kind of on the go worker. Our sales force are people, they are always in the field. They need to have access to information as well on their mobile devices, whether it’s iPad or iPhone or Android device. Again, they may not generate as much new information as others do, but they need to communicate, they need to have quick access to a person or resource and so on, so having a private messaging, instant messaging, all in one place, not only to reach out to a person, anybody can do it today by text messaging or email, but also then when they need to look it up, search for that information, MangoApps have already provided the ability to search through private messages, instant messages, and so on, to capture that moment of interaction and kind of reuse that information again.”

Christine Goldsmith, Director of Learning Development:

“I have never been a Facebook user myself, and I know there’s a lot of sometimes analogies with Facebook or people who use Twitter, and so not having had experience in those areas, I was wondering what the experience was going to be like, and I found that it was actually pretty easy to learn and to navigate through. And from the learning perspective, a lot of it was just kind of diving in, experimenting a little bit, and then just making sure that we had people to go through and ask questions as the project evolved for us.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“Knowing how they worked before and coming into the new world of social media, the overwhelming, potentially overwhelming amount of information, that eventually kind of settled down, but the positive, the visibility, every employee now having a voice was a key. And especially people that did not have a voice before and now having it was just a huge recognition, not only for them but their managers and their peers. Now you can really reach through anywhere in the company.”

Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“What I really appreciate as a mid-size business is the flexibility of the Mango team in working with us early on once we selected them on our shortlist. The ability to bring folks in that was willing to listen to some of the ideas that weren’t part of the Mango feature set and then work with us to tweak and adjust some of the modules that were available for us was a huge benefit. We had some of the other platforms that were much more structured and much less willing to change and make adjustments, but Mango was very accommodating. To KM, we’re looking at it as a very brand new type of a platform, and so we really appreciated that flexibility and support from the team.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“I think the most fundamental difference, I still use it as an example, was we never really exchanged a single email throughout the project, so the MangoApps team itself is using MangoApps to deliver the services, so all of the project, maybe with couple conference calls, if that, we were able to deliver through the MangoApps platform, so essentially MangoApps stood up an instance, actually a couple of instances for us, where we were able to exchange support, calls, ideas, enhancements, requests, and responsiveness was just phenomenal. And again, the size of the team and just the nature of how the people were servicing regardless of where they were, just impressive experience.”

Jim Maul, Chief Information Officer:

“Now is the time to look at expanding the scope or the capability of your traditional intranet, and incorporating social, incorporating collaboration to me are absolute requirements now. And I certainly would hope that as you look at the landscape, you look at innovative companies like MangoApps and include them in your selection list so that you’ve got a chance to compare some of the legacy vendors with some of the new vendors that are bringing some really innovative and different technologies to the mix.”

Vojta Borovian, IT Director:

“Well, first of all, I would highly recommend MangoApps, and the reason for that is because if you do want to capture what is happening out there with social media and what is possible with social enterprise and what people, when they go into their personal lives, and they are experiencing on Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, and they want to have similar experience yet with the umbrella of the enterprise, MangoApps, in my opinion, is matching at the closest possible, yet not at the cost of complexities of some of the other tools that we may see out there. So there’s intuitiveness, but there’s that immediate benefit of familiarity that you may see in Amazon or Facebook or some of the social media tools out there.”

Ryan Arakaki, Director of Marketing:

“Team members that haven’t started using KM Live, I would encourage them to start using it. It’s a lot more efficient way to communicate within the company and collaborate on projects.

Well, I’m hoping as I begin to use it more and the rest of the company starts to adapt it, the use of email would decline. Anything you can achieve in email can be captured and done in KM Live.”

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