The BSH Household Appliances GmbH is the largest manufacturer of household appliances in Europe and one of the world's leading companies in this industry. Around 40 manufacturing sites and a strong network of some 80 sales, production and service companies in around 50 countries form the foundation of BSH's customer-focused 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.
In today's high-tech culture, information is spread across many places and most employees have little insight into what their colleagues are working on. This makes communication difficult and leads to limited collaboration. Linchpin and Confluence provide a technical solution that makes it easy for departments, teams and employees to share information and stay informed via an intranet.
Replacement of the existing Sharepoint intranet
The goal of the project was Extend existing top-down intranet communicationto give not only the editorial team, but also every user the opportunity to contribute to a transparent and topic-centered intranet. For this purpose, a platform based on Atlassian Confluence was developed with the support of the software Linchpin which was adapted to the requirements of the BSH. Linchpin expands the basic functions of Confluence to provide the most important functions of a modern, social intranet. Until the implementation of the new intranet, the company's own intranet was based on Microsoft Sharepoint.
Development of an intranet based on Confluence and Linchpin. Individually developed Confluence Apps and Macros, integration into the company's own Identity Access Management System (IAM), corporate branding, technical project coordination and operational design.
Atlassian Confluence Data Center, Atlassian Crowd, Custom Developed SSO, Linchpin Intranet Suite, Advanced Image GalleryInclude+, k15t Translations, NewRelic, Elastic Stack, Kibana, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
At the forefront of the project, BSH had formulated USPs (Unique-Selling-Points) , which represent certain expected management characteristics of the new intranet in order to set it apart from other projects and from the competition as a unique selling point. These unique selling propositions included:
Personalized user experience
The new intranet offers every user the possibility to configure and personalize the displayed content and profile according to his or her wishes (e.g. description of the field of activity, addition of profile pictures and deposit of contact data).
In addition, technical solutions have been implemented that make it possible to provide each user with content tailored to their department, team or location.
Social interaction and engagement
With the newly added social media features, users can comment, like and share news and posts as usual. All post interactions are also 100% transparent. In this way, B/S/H/ creates an open communication culture and enables direct feedback.
News from the management and specialist departments are weighted equally in the news stream. This means that all users on the platform meet as equals.
Collaboration and employee contributions
In addition to internal company, management or location news, employees can also publish new contributions independently on the new intranet and thus work together on new ideas or topics. This promotes a constant exchange of knowledge.
Breaking open silos
Many topics are dealt with by several departments at the same time, and communication barriers are avoided via the open intranet platform. The new intranet empowers teams to work together on strategic topics and thus drive projects and communication within the company more efficiently.
BSH Hausgeräte has won the Inkometa Award for the best intranet in the category Social Intranet / Collaboration Intranet. The Inkometa Award is one of the most important prizes for internal communication in Germany and is awarded by SCM - School for Communication and Management.
The intranet is used in a company with more than 60,000 employees:inside actively used, and is thereby in 25 languages and 51 countries available. XALT provided a tailor-made solution especially for the BSH intranet project. This includes the creation of a custom theme for the intranet and the development of several Atlassian apps according to BSH's wishes.
In the intranet projectt of the B/S/H/ are DevOps Best Practices were used. The integration of Continuous Integration & Deployment made it possible to release new features and updates to the code in a consistent cycle (daily/weekly).
Through quality control with Pull Requests and Feature Branch Test Systems ensures that all customizations work correctly. This way, it is possible to release features without a week's worth of tuning and to keep to the tight schedule.
The individual steps in the practical implementation of the project can be considered in the following video be considered in more detail.
Further information on the project is also available in the success story by init : BSH Household Appliances Digital Workplace
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