Manufacturing · 4,500-employee company

NGK Ceramics

The canteen sends the menu by email. The rest happens by itself.

The challenge: who is going to keep it running?

This is the question that decides the fate of every internal communication tool - and it is usually asked too late, after the rollout.

The app may be excellent, but if one person in HR has to type in all the content, within a few months it stops being up to date. And then employees stop opening it.

At NGK Ceramics some information changes every week: the menus in four company canteens and the medical duty roster. Nobody in HR should be spending their time retyping PDF files.

The solution

Content is updated by the people who create it - with an ordinary email

The canteen sends the menu exactly as it always did: by email, with a file attached. The medical centre sends its duty roster the same way.

Nobody logs into an admin panel. Nobody goes through training. Nobody even has to know they are using a system at all.

The canteen sends an email with a fileAn ordinary message with next week menu attached.

The system checks the senderA list of authorised addresses is defined in the admin panel. A message from any other address will not be accepted.

It recognises what the file is aboutBased on the file name and its contents, the system works out on its own which of the four canteens the menu belongs to and which week it covers - the current one or the next.

An administrator approves itThey receive a notification that a file has arrived. Without their approval the content will not appear in the app.

The menu is in the appIn the right canteen and the right week. Employees see the menu for the current and the following week.

Why this matters

This mechanism solves the problem that kills most rollouts: keeping the content alive after launch.

People outside the communications team - a cook, a nurse, a shift supervisor - can contribute to the app without being given access to the admin panel and without any training. For the IT department it also means fewer accounts to manage and fewer permissions to grant.

And because every file passes through administrator approval, the communications team keeps full control over what reaches employees.

Universality

The same mechanism works for any kind of content

The email channel is not tied to menus or duty rosters. It can be connected to any other tile in the app - schedules, department announcements, documents, training plans. It always works the same way: authorised sender, automatic recognition of the content, administrator approval.

In numbers

4500employees in the company

4canteens handled automatically

200+menus a year with no HR involvement