Digital Workplace and Intranet for 60,000 Employees at BSH Hausgeräte

BSH Hausgeräte GmbH is the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe and one of the world's leading companies in this industry. Around 40 manufacturing sites and a strong network of about 80 sales, production and service companies in around 50 countries form the foundation of BSH's customer-oriented business model.

Being the first choice for consumers worldwide drives the company and its employees. With its exceptional brands, high-quality products and superior solutions, BSH aims to improve people's quality of life.

The starting situation

In today's high-tech culture, information is spread across many places, and most employees have little insight into what their colleagues are currently working on. This makes communication harder and leads to limited collaboration. With Linchpin and Confluence, a technical solution is available that lets departments, teams and employees easily exchange information and stay up to date via an intranet.

The challenge: replacing the existing SharePoint intranet

The goal of the project was to expand the existing top-down intranet communication, giving not only the editorial team but every user the ability to contribute to a transparent, topic-centered intranet. For this, a platform based on Atlassian Confluence was built with the support of the Linchpin software, adapted to BSH's requirements. Linchpin adds the most important features of a modern, social intranet to Confluence's base functionality. Until the new intranet was realized, the company's own intranet was built on Microsoft SharePoint.

• only top-down communication was possible
• access was only possible internally via the network
• there was no mobile access option or solution
• content creation was very static and complicated

Building an intranet based on Confluence and Linchpin, custom-developed Confluence apps and macros, integration into the company's own identity access management system (IAM), corporate branding, technical project coordination and operations concept.

Products used

Atlassian Confluence Data Center, Atlassian Crowd, Custom Developed SSO, Linchpin Intranet Suite, Advanced Image Gallery, Include+, K15t Translations, New Relic, Elastic Stack, Kibana, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

The intranet is actively used at a company with more than 60,000 employees and is available in 25 languages and 51 countries. XALT delivered a tailor-made solution specifically for BSH's intranet project. This includes creating a custom theme for the intranet as well as developing several Atlassian apps to BSH's specifications.

• visual design of the user interface based on B/S/H's corporate identity
• distinguishing individual user groups into readers, editors and admins through updated user permission management (IAM – identity access management)
• the intranet as a growing, flexible product – active input from users for continuous improvement through feedback