About

Founded in Germany in 1931, SEW-Eurodrive launched its Brazilian industry unit in 1978 in São Paulo.  SEW-Eurodrive has more than 10,000 employees globally, including 11 factories in 39 countries with sales of more than € 1.2 billion.  A leader in drive technology, SEW-Eurodrive offers geared motors, frequency inverters, server-drive systems, decentralised drive systems and industrial gear units to ensure that the world keeps moving.

Challenge

According to Maurício Arguello, Director of Technology at SEW, the company needed the Intranet and corporate Web sites to contain up-to-date and fresh content.  Traditionally, these tasks had been performed by the SEW IT staff. Consequently, the tremendous demands on their time and the overloaded technology obligated the company to adopt a more efficient and professional solution.

Arguello’s primary objectives included centralising the company’s South American Intranet sites and unifying global content according to corporate standards and guidelines.  Because SEW’s IT staff had become burdened with performing manual updates to the site, moving to a CMS system that would allow users with little or no technical skills to make content changes to the site effortlessly and within a short period of time was essential.  With Working with a content management system (CMS) that was easy to use, and required short training timelittle training, SEW also looked to simplify internal processes for approving content and improve overall customer satisfaction with the site. SEW selected RedDot Content Management Server (CMS) to solve these problems.

SEW-Eurodrive needed a content management solution that would:

• Standardise global content and improve brand integrity across all global Web sites
• Eliminate the dependency on IT staff to get time critical content up and running on the site
• Streamline workflow and organisation processes for approving and publishing content
• Improve overall customer satisfaction by streamlining online visitor experience

Solution

"With RedDot CMS, our Intranet became more attractive and today is the communication environment used by employees and departments. The site navigation became consistent, and the site works as a self-manageable procedure, allowing our IT people to focus on higher priority tasks", said Arguello.

SEW’s Intranet was the pilot project where they were able to standardise the Intranet graphical design. By using RedDot CMS to manage their content, SEW staff can now archive documents, control access to the editing and administration environments, and control the content to be published through an automated publishing process. The successes of the project motivated SEW to start the Internet migration to RedDot CMS.

SEW’s current goal is to decentralise the task of updating Internet content by releasing content maintenance responsibilities to the SEW marketing department, a departure from their old process, which involved the IT division. “The system is very simple. The users need only basic Microsoft Office expertise. The process of adding or modifying content is extremely simple, especially for people with little to no user training,” added Arguello.

Results

RedDot CMS delivered a solution that allowed SEW-Eurodrive to experience increased time savings when training end users on the easy to use RedDot user interface.  SEW content editors and approvers were trained in as little as 6 hours and administrators were trained within only 3 days. With their new publishing process in place, the IT team achieved more productivity after distributing content maintenance responsibilities to business users in the marketing department, and as a result, saved a significant amount of time, money and technical resources.

Even more impressive is that SEW reduced the volume of archived paper by 50%. SEW looks forward to creating more than one Web domain and additional Internet and Extranet sites. “This way, the company is improving its communication with the market in general and with customers. This is a great communication strategy based on technology,” concluded Arguello.
 
SEW’s future plans include the migration of its Extranet content to RedDot CMS improvements to the localisation and translation of Intranet content with RedDot Translation Editor’s extensive translation capabilities.