About

B. Braun is a world leading healthcare provider. Its products and services are aimed at four different medical fields: hospitals, surgery, practices (care centres and doctors’ surgeries), as well as extracorporeal blood treatment. The company’s range of products and services provides solutions for optimum patient care. Its product range is extensive – from active ingredients for anaesthesia to skin and wound management and surgical instruments.

Challenge

The globally active healthcare provider was looking for a solution to optimise its internal information logistics based on SAP Enterprise Portal. The company wanted to reinforce its slogan “Sharing Expertise” with a solid IT platform, that would allow staff to exchange knowledge across locations and divisions. The company wanted its information and data to be stored transparently and uniformly, and to connect all data sources (often stand-alone solutions). The aim was to prevent knowledge from being lost, to connect content items in a context-sensitive way and to minimise the time required for information to be transferred.

One of the technical goals was to connect the SAP material master with data from around 800,000 components and 166,000 saleable items with unstructured content such as descriptive text, images and other intranet content, making it available to members of staff. The company wanted the system to be extremely simple to operate so that staff with no knowledge of HTML would be able to add content. It also had to be flexible with scaleability and performance to support the ever increasing quantity of information in the company’s 190 international subsidiaries. Another goal was to use the new system to complement the pull organisation, i.e. the call up of information, with push organisation (with content alerts and other). This would provide members of staff with content relevant to their work, as well as with applications that match their profile.

Solution

After evaluating the different systems and providers of portals, as well as commercial and open source content management systems (CMS), RedDot CMS and RedDot LiveServer were selected in conjunction with the SAP Enterprise Portal as the most suitable system. The deciding factors were the solution’s ease-of-use, as well as the large base of satisfied global customers, the enormous flexibility integrating with third-party systems, as well as the “Personalisation iView” integration for connecting to the SAP Portal. The RedDot iView can be integrated into the SAP portal interface without requiring any programming. As a component of RedDot LiveServer, the solution provides a complete interface for user administration so that user data does not have to be duplicated or stored unnecessarily. RedDot LiveServer use of SAP’s single sign-on (SAP logon ticket) guarantees that each user attribute and group assignment is automatically transferred to the RedDot system by the LDAP server during logon. Personalisation, as well as the actual creation of editorial content, is extremely simple: Using the iView, each portal user can be granted browser-based access to the RedDot Content Management System where they can create their own content. This decentralised content maintenance makes it possible for the content experts in the company to edit the information consistently, whilst adhering to corporate design standards. Content can be easily maintained by editors working in different locations and without requiring help from IT experts. All they have to do is to transparently switch between the SAP portal and the content management system. The layout of the iView matches the look of the other products perfectly.

In the iView, the editors can immediately see which areas they are allowed to edit. The RedDot Translation Editor assists with the translation process for multi language support. It can be used to define into which languages in the B. Braun Portal any new content should be translated. The Translation Editor co-ordinates tasks automatically and processes them: If changes are made to the central content, the translator automatically receives a notification of the content to be translated. This applies to newly created areas as well as deleted Web pages.

• Implementing an extensive portal solution which integrates existing applications(e-procurement, employee self-service, etc.)
• Creating browser-based pull/push access to current and structured information for all staff worldwide

Results

RedDot kept its promise of a short implementation timeframe and fast results. Within six months, the IT department was able to implement complex Web projects and implement company requirements using RedDot without requiring assistance.

Access to company knowledge provided by the new portal, as well as the creation of a data pool for all information on the company and its products had a whole range of business benefits, such as:

• Competitive advantage due to faster and more efficient knowledge transfer
• Optimisation of the company’s working methods due to central document management
• Improvement in the company’s knowledge network as well as sharing knowledge with each other = “Sharing Expertise”
• Clear definition and mapping of company processes and content
• Highly integrated knowledge
• Implementation of professional search functions (Verity in the content area)
• Increased transparency in the company thanks to the flexible changeover of the central portal interface to country-specific views

Today a small IT Web team is able to manage the complex, multilingual portal without the need for  external assistance. About ten to fifteen percent of the 250 authors work simultaneously in different locations to keep the “B. Braun Knowledge Center” up to date. Short-term requirements can be quickly implemented in the Web environment. For example, it was possible to design, implement and launch a microsite on the subject of bird flu at http://www.vogelgrippe.bbraun.de/ in just three days. This would not have been possible in such a short timescale without the ease-of-use of RedDot CMS.