The Client
Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. (ACT) is the leader in the Canadian convenience store industry. As of April 29, 2018, Couche-Tard’s network comprised 10,015 convenience stores throughout North America, including 8,705 stores with road transportation fuel dispensing.

The Situation
ACT wanted to ensure that store owners and employees could stay connected to the global company from every store. The organization allows its huge community to grow and thrive in an organic way, using the new engagement tool that is the intranet. The platform needed to become more efficient through information sharing and collaboration among employees. ACT strives to allow stores to connect with each other in the same regions, as this provides a great opportunity to collaborate and share insights.

The Challenge
To understand the challenges that Alimentation Couche-Tard was aiming to solve for, it is important to understand the scope of the company and project. ACT as an organization has 130,000 employees, operating in 25 countries and regions. The company operates out of 16,000 stores worldwide. ACT has achieved significant growth in the past 10 years, particularly as a result of acquisitions. As a people-centric company, it became increasingly difficult to engage with their store owners and employees. The proposed solution would allow local access to timely and relevant company content and crucial information. With the scope of the global company, it was an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking, but with the worthwhile objective of bringing together all 130,000 employees and providing them with a sense of community.

The Solution
In partnership with OPIN, ACT developed two principal approaches to developing this intranet. The first was a phased launch, and the second was the use of an agile methodology. The launch was carried out in four phases. It started with a pilot, and moved across all regions to eventually encompass the entire organization. Rollouts in smaller regions allowed ACT to make adjustments based on the ongoing results as the intranet was gradually deployed. As regions were added, the intranet was optimized to enable all users to benefit from the resource.

The second aspect of the intranet rollout was an Agile software development methodology. The mantra – “done is better than perfect.” By continually building functional components, OPIN allowed ACT to test these components in real time. Users were integrated gradually, and outcomes were evaluated on an ongoing basis, so that the OPIN team could optimize the intranet during each software development sprint. Every bit of knowledge made the intranet better, in turn creating an optimal user experience. This approach was user-centric – the strategy was targeted toward the publishers that made the tool what it is, and the users that would benefit the most from the intranet.

Acquia was instrumental in the delivery of the project, and a key piece of the success of the intranet. ACT faced a unique challenge in building a platform that reached a global audience and provided local access for thousands of store owners and employees. It was crucial that the intranet was secure and reliable for people all over the world. This is where Acquia came in. The solution is backed not only by enterprise-level security and reliability, but has lightning-fast loading times in spite of its massive scope. The intranet is home to so many pieces of content and discussions, yet still manages to meet the expectations of users all over the world. This is the impact that Acquia had on the project.

The Results
With Acquia and OPIN, ACT was able to consolidate eight legacy intranets into one centralized global platform. This meant that ACT was able to aggregate all of the organization’s knowledge, content and resources into one place. There are now 106,503 users on the intranet, meaning that nearly every employee of ACT has access to the global platform.

• 1.4 million pageviews
• Top five business units reached 41-75 percent staff engagement on intranet
• Most commented pages reached 50-plus comments
• Usage rates in some views up 50 percent