SigmaNet: one intranet for Sigma’s people in Mexico, Europe and the US, built once and growing since 2019

Sigma is a food company with 66 plants and 179 distribution centers in 17 countries across the Americas and Europe (Sigma, September 2026). Its intranet had been developed in-house and was not ready to scale beyond one country.

Sigma’s people do not all need the same news. In Mexico alone, the HR system lists 153 sites, most of them plants and distribution centers; in Europe, employees read in eight languages, from Spanish and Portuguese to German, Dutch and Romanian. On the old intranet, even people’s “favorites” were chosen for them by the administrators, and services like vacations were only links to other systems. One intranet for all of them had to know who each person is and show them what applies to them, alongside what matters to everyone at Sigma.

Sigma asked us for a new employee portal built from reusable components and assets, so the same portal could be implemented in, and extended to, other countries.

Designed for the rollouts that would follow

We started in June 2019 with design workshops with Sigma’s team on employee needs, information architecture and content strategy, then built SigmaNet for Mexico on Liferay and our Portal Blueprint: one global site with region pages, country microsites and department microsites. The workshops set the priorities: HR fundamentals first, services easy to reach, and a phased release so employees would not be overwhelmed. It went live on December 2, 2019.

The right news for each person

SigmaNet targets content by each employee’s country, company and site, read from Sigma’s employee directory, and combines it with global content on every page. In 2021–2022 we added the operating unit, because people who share a country, company and site can still belong to different business units, and rolled it out for Mexico and the US. The same targeting drives the small things people look for: birthdays, work anniversaries and new hires at their own site.

Europe and the US on the same foundation

For Europe (2020) we mapped the 764 URLs of the European intranet to decide what to migrate, added single sign-on through Microsoft Azure, showed each European employee the applications their role gives them access to, and limited their search to European and global content, so they no longer land on Mexico’s compliance policies. The US followed in 2021, with a bilingual English and Spanish headquarters site.

Room to grow

Because the components were built to be reused, new sites start from them: business microsites for innovation (2020), technology (2021) and the nutrition and health unit (2024), and, in 2025–2026, a bilingual microsite for Sigma’s cultural fundamentals, with a career center where each employee sees the contacts for their own unit.

SigmaNet grew from a portal for Mexico into Sigma’s intranet for Mexico, Europe and the US, on the components and patterns built in 2019. Each employee sees the news for their own country, company, site and unit, and new sites start from the same components instead of from scratch.

We have supported and extended SigmaNet every year since 2020, and still do in 2026.