A fourth-generation firm had distinct offerings wearing one name, so we helped unite them behind one hub
Duininck is a family-owned, fourth-generation heavy-civil construction and materials firm approaching its centennial. Like a lot of companies that grow across generations and divisions, it had distinct offerings & companies wearing one name: different systems, different back offices, and a large field workforce that email never really reached.
They brought that problem to an RFP. We built the answer: Duininck ONE, a mobile-first hub that finally reaches every employee running on Duininck’s cloud environment and handed over as theirs.
The challenge
The strategy named it plainly: fragmentation. Inconsistent communication, divisions running similar work in different ways, a culture getting harder to feel across locations. Underneath that sat some hard technical realities:
- A field workforce that didn’t use laptops. The hub had to reach people on their own phones. That’s not a nice-to-have in construction; it’s the whole point.
- Two HR systems across one company. Any single hub had to connect to both, not pretend they were one.
- Multiple divisions across multiple states. One experience had to serve all of them without flattening what made each distinct.
The approach
A team that had both strategy and build working together iterated on the solution. The strategic leg came first: a Duininck ONE strategy written ahead of the RFP, built on clear pillars and a plain-spoken vision: one site to connect, communicate, and celebrate across the company. From there we scoped hard, narrowing a sprawling wish list to a shippable core so the thing would actually launch instead of drifting.
We built the intranet site using a modern CMS in Duininck’s own Azure environment, with Microsoft single sign-on, a people directory, a community feed with a “Shout-Outs” recognition channel, safety Toolbox Talks, alerts, forms, search, and an embedded Copilot assistant, plus a documented component library so the team could keep building after we left.
The result
Duininck ONE launched company-wide and transitioned to Duininck’s ownership, backed by training and a client-ready component library. The truest test came on day one.
On rollout day, a small subset of employees who belonged to a very large number of security groups hit and hit a sign-on failure: an oversized authentication token, the kind of edge case that only shows up under actual enterprise complexity. We diagnosed it and fixed it quickly on launch day, by switching the configuration in azure. The client’s own technology lead confirmed it.
The team also delivered beyond the original priority scope: the full people directory, the recognition channel, safety talks, alerts, forms, search, and the embedded assistant all shipped.
Who this is for
If you’re a multi-division or multi-location company whose systems have drifted apart faster than your people have (different platforms per division, a frontline workforce your email never reaches, a culture that’s harder to feel than it used to be) this is a success story. One team sets the strategy and ships the product into your own cloud, then hands you the keys. We don’t hand you a strategy deck and wish you luck, and we don’t start building before anyone’s decided what the thing is for.
If your company’s needs a way to stay connected, we’d love to help you feel like one again.