BODE CHEMIE
As part of the Beiersdorf group, BODE CHEMIE a leading chemicals
company, needs to ensure there is a constant and comprehensive
flow of information to consumers and commercial partners about
its new product developments. To do this BODE CHEMIE had to provide
a platform for employees to share information about new pharmaceutical
legislation, directives and programmes that would ultimately benefit
the consumer.
BODE CHEMIE Revolutionises Internal Corporate Communications
Due to the nature of BODE CHEMIE’s work in fields of research and development and with staff from a wide variety of disciplines, the company realised that a continuous flow of information was vital to the efficient operation of the business. BODE CHEMIE selected Hyperwave’s knowledge management and e-learning infrastructure to develop an intranet to be the primary source of information for all BODE CHEMIE employees and improve overall corporate communications.
Prior to revamping the internal communications process, BODE CHEMIE employees spent a large amount of their time informing their sales representatives of changes to products and developing new documentation to accompany these changes. By centralising this type of information all employees would benefit – particularly the external sales force who travel regularly and are away from head office for long periods of time.
To plan the new system, BODE CHEMIE set up a knowledge-management project group. Representatives from all parts of the business attended workshops to look at information flows within the company. As a result, general rules for the planned intranet were developed and, based on these, the system requirements were defined and software providers evaluated. Hyperwave’s IS/6 knowledge-management platform was selected as the chosen platform. After only four months’ work on the project, involving just 11 days of external implementation on site, the intranet went online.
For us, it was particularly important that staff, sales and customers alike should all benefit from electronic data management – via a single system. Dr Marco Rudolf, project leader at BODE CHEMIE
The browser-based intranet supports a wide range of formats such as HTML and MS Office documents, picture, graphics and pdf files and handles access rights within the company according to function and role. Automatic link-management is integrated and hyperlinks are automatically adapted if a document is moved or renamed. If something is deleted, the hyperlink ceases to be visible to the user. All documents are stored with a series of additional details such as author and field of expertise, so the system determines which employees specialise in what fields – meaning these employees can be located at any time. This ensures that their knowledge can be applied anywhere it happens to be needed.
If new products come on to the market, sales teams need to access the product information but also need to be able to make active use of it. The intranet can be individually configured so that sales and marketing are proactively informed as soon as new, relevant data is available in the system. All employees – from R&D to sales – can now access BODE CHEMIE‘s new intranet for current news, personnel information, lists of helpful links and a quality manual.
As the information on the intranet provides employees with current data taken from R&D, training materials and product descriptions, customer service levels are also radically improving. In the pharmaceuticals and chemicals industry, customer confidence is essential so if customers raise questions or experience problems after their purchase, BODE CHEMIE can now deliver the answers more quickly.
The decisive factor to use Hyperwave’s IS/6 was user-friendliness, in particular the ability to use the ‘drag and drop’ function from Windows environments in order to publicise content. ‘Only if the system is accepted and regularly updated by everyone does an intranet make sense,’ is the unanimous view of everyone involved. An internal evaluation showed that about 75% of all staff use the system actively every day.
In a second phase of the project – the extension of the intranet to a knowledge-management system – additional external data sources will be integrated, such as a database of expert opinions with over 1,000 product reports and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Extensive information sources, including the complete catalogue with over 400 products, will then complete the system. BODE anticipates a marked increase in the speed of information flow from marketing via sales to the customer.
The proposed knowledge platform will also stimulate the exchange of information amongst employees. Employees in the sales force will gain a relevant forum for discussing customer problems and how to solve them – something that has not been possible before due to the geographical separation of sales areas.