Haniel Group Net

Employee portal

Comments

"Sharing knowledge, structuring the daily work routine more efficiently and creating a common identity – those are the goals of the Haniel Group Net. The employee portal has given us a group-wide platform for the first time that enables us to exchange information and ideas across company division lines and national boundaries. We want this network to foster even more ideas for group-wide projects."
Thomas Heuwing, Corporate Branding Manager, Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH

Project description:

The Haniel Group holding company, Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH, oversees, controls and supports communications and business processes through a variety of group applications in the company's own employee portal. The myriad information to be provided in the employee portal is steadily increasing in the company's dynamic environment.

This applies to both quantitative information generated within the scope of portal applications for instance, and qualitative information (all types of documents). As the company grows, so does its need for modern Knowledge Management. The existing Haniel intranet had to be replaced in order to meet the company’s demanding requirement specifications. The idea for the Haniel Group Net was born.

Design Highlights

"This employee portal sets new standards when it comes to design and performance," says Dirk Müller, Portal Program Manager at Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH. In addition to pixel-precise accuracy and the strict enforcement of the group-wide corporate design, a co-branding concept was implemented that remains unsurpassed today in the field of Intranet applications.

A uniform user interface was developed both for Haniel-Holding and the four group business divisions Celesio, CWS-boco, ELG and TAKKT. Modifications were made to a handful of design parameters such as the logo and corporate colors in the Haniel Group Net to achieve a strong visual similarity to the respective corporate designs. This played a decisive role in generating user acceptance for the application, because the group-wide portal project also replaced previously existing decentralized intranets.

Conceptual Highlights

The conceptual design behind the Haniel employee portal was based on the overlying principle of providing end users with portal content specifically tailored to their work environment. Following this guideline, users are presented with a wide range of customization options: Every end user has access to a completely personalized environment allowing them to freely design up to 10 different portal pages. Users can access both editorial content and select from a set of widgets. These widgets include a variety of Internet services (e.g. Falk route planning, airport information, Leo) and SAP applications (e.g. ESS scenarios). The broad range of customization options was also carried over to the supply of information. For instance, users can fully customize their version of the press review.

Technical highlights

The main technological challenge was creating a high-performance Internet presence with portal response times of under a second. Acceptable performance was key – even for low bandwidth connections. "The only way to achieve this kind of performance was to take full advantage of streamlined rendering technology," explains btexx Project Manager Mathias Zimmermann. "We discussed a number of different approaches throughout the course of the project. What really convinced us was the prototype deployment based on Groovy, developed by our btexx Software Architect," Zimmerman continues.

Usability was another core requirement alongside performance optimization. "In selecting our Content Management System we placed a great deal of importance on the option of decentralized content management as well as a simple and intuitive editor interface. btexx easyWCM perfectly combines both criteria," says Dirk Müller, the responsible Project Manager at Haniel.