Clean Harbors

Clean Harbors Environmental Services, Inc. (Nasdaq: CLHB) is the leading provider of environmental, energy and industrial services throughout North America. The Company serves over 60,000 customers, including a majority of the Fortune 500, thousands of smaller private entities and numerous federal, state, provincial and local governmental agencies. With facilities spread all over the United States and Canada, including locations in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and fueled by an acquisition that tripled its size, Clean Harbors needed a centralized source where all 4,000 employees could go to access their applications, news, and human resource materials.
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Challenge

Clean Harbors was in the process of acquiring a division of SafetyKleen, and with it, approximately 2,000 employees. To assist in the integration of this substantial addition to the employee base, Clean Harbors needed an elegant, simple user experience, delivered within its existing intranet, to disseminate news content and provide access to hundreds of line-of-business applications across all of Clean Harbors’ business units, plants and facilities. Without a framework or uniform user interface, employees lacked centralized, security-specific access to critical applications.

Miller Systems’ challenge in building this single online source was three-fold, beginning with the strict time limitation associated with the completion of the SafetyKleen acquisition:

  • The new employee portal needed to be ready on or before the date the acquisition closed.
  • An elegant content management framework that would be easy for non-technical personnel to update and manage was essential to the solution.
  • Miller Systems needed to integrate the solution with Clean Harbors’ existing IT infrastructure to ensure secure, personalized access to information for all levels of employees.

Solution

After conducting an accelerated, but detailed definition process with the stakeholders at Clean Harbors, Miller Systems designed the UX and technical specifications for a personalized employee delivery framework. This framework would ensure that upon login, employees would be presented with the news and application “launchpads” appropriate for their specific position, job title, region, and facility type. In addition to the security and personalization, the solution was, of course, compliant with Clean Harbors’ established branding standards, and was designed to be extremely user-friendly.

Miller Systems was able to quickly deliver an elegant, easily maintained content management solution for the news portion of the project by leveraging its dataDriver PressRoom technology. A special edition of Press Room was tailored for Clean Harbors, extending and customizing its feature set to work with the new employee delivery framework, using Microsoft’s .NET Framework.

On the technical side, Miller Systems worked closely with Clean Harbors’ IT and development staff to tightly integrate the solution with existing PeopleSoft, Active Directory and other custom databases required to deliver the security rules as it had been defined. In doing so, Miller Systems enabled Clean Harbors to define and manage access privileges, quickly and easily, within a custom browser based administration console.

Result

Completed in time for the SafetyKleen acquisition, the Clean Harbors employee portal was extremely well-received, and was able to serve as a “Welcome Wagon” for over 2,000 new employees upon their official arrival. The Clean Harbors’ portal provided all employees with a well-designed online resource where personalized news and applications could be accessed, using their familiar credentials from Microsoft Active Directory.

With easy to navigate, directed content and applications, Clean Harbors’ employee portal centralized and streamlined access to important information, and ultimately helped to increase employee awareness and productivity.

The Clean Harbors staff responsible for managing the content and application access were able to do so effectively, with minimal training or ongoing expense.