The Berner Group Intranet Relauch

Project Aim: User Acceptance - The Berner Group Intranet Relauch

As a direct sales company, Berner specializes in trading parts for construction and automotive businesses and the industrial segment. Around 8,000 employees, over 5,000 of which work in field service, provide professional and dependable customer service in Europe.

The company decided to restructure its international employee portal in 2009. They wanted to expand the platform into a central, global communications medium and make it available to all of their international locations. Katja Ermis, responsible for International Communications, describes the goal of the project: “The most important objective beyond adapting the visual appearance of the frame work to the Berner CI/CD standard was primarily improving content management for our editors – a task that had been extremely difficult in the past. Another aim of the relaunch was to further increase user acceptance of the Berner intranet with respect to its look and feel, software and structure.”

btexx business technolgies supported the Berner employee portal relaunch. The company's consulting activities focused on integrating an interface design specific to the Berner Group. btexx easyWCM software, which is optimized for content management in the SAP enterprise portal, helped make it possible to carry out editorial work Europe-wide. Today, around 80 editors use the Berner “B.net”.

Users demand modern design
The Berner employee portal was designed in the style of a Web 2.0 Internet page . A design agency delivered pixel-precise specifications for page types and content elements. The modern screen design and the clear navigational concept made the intranet much more user friendly.

Content management without programming knowledge fosters interactivity
“btexx easyWCM” software helped simplify content management in the Berner employee portal. Employees from different departments can manage content without programming knowledge. Today every location publishes its own regional news in predefined areas. The Berner headquarters in Künzelsau delivers business-relevant messages that are essential for all of the company's locations.

Multi-language intranet content ensures international acceptance
Almost all of the intranet content is published in multiple languages to ensure acceptance of the platform in more than 23 countries. When creating German news, the responsible editors in the international subsidiaries can translate and publish content into the respective national languages quickly and easily thanks to btexx easyWCM.

Individually designable homepage creates relevance
The Berner intranet homepage provides clearly structured access to content. It features a wide range of “informational tidbits” tailored to the needs of a variety of user groups. Content assembly can be designed individually for each location: News from the German headquarters is provided alongside regional and local notifications.

The Berner intranet relaunch was implemented as an interface project between the Corporate Communications and IT departments. This made it possible to give equal consideration to requirements from a technical, content and design perspective. “The intranet enjoys immense popularity within our company. Another added benefit is that are now able to fully conclude our international rollout. Every Berner Group country is connected and now works on the same information and knowledge platform,” Katja Ermis and Marcel Beck, International IT, say about the overall success of the project.