New centralized information platform

The Eppendorf Group is a leading life sciences company that develops and distributes equipment, consumables and services for liquid handling, sampling handling and cell handling for use in laboratories all over the world.

As an international Group, the company lacked a single point of access to available information, data and potential knowledge, as this was distributed across various company-internal systems and multiple locations.

The project therefore aimed to network these various repositories via a central, global platform. Ideally, all information streams would merge together and be universally accessible. In the future, the respective markets and branches would have a localised full-text search available in their national language, making it possible to identify available data in a quick, targeted manner. Localised news would be another feature, which could be scheduled for publishing and de-publishing as required.

The planned new intranet would be clearly structured, intuitive to use and appealing, so as to ensure rapid acceptance and utilisation by the Group’s 5,500 employees. FirstSpirit was specified as the content management system (CMS). And there was one last challenge: just eleven weeks were available for the conceptual design, backend and implementation.

Alongside setup of the data platform itself, project implementation also focused on identifying the best solution from a user perspective, so as to ensure that the required content could be found quickly and easily, and that content queries produced high-quality search results. This would be instrumental in achieving acceptance for the new tool, driving its rapid incorporation into personal workflows by individual employees and ensuring the potential for improved information procurement produces concrete results. A key component in this process was the universal full-text search provided by Monday Consulting for FirstSpirit, which also enables users to locate content in other formats, such as PDF.

In technical terms, Monday Consulting organized the entire backend into containers that unify and handle the various features as separate microservices. This makes it possible to manage a dense and dynamic environment while maintaining high standards for auditing and security.

Wherever they are in the world, virtually all of the Group’s employees now use the intranet to access its shared knowledge. From contacts to news, content or downloads, the intranet focuses on finding instead of searching. Intranet site usability is also responsive across any user device. Alongside a global search with local filter options, quick links enhance the platform by offering commonly-used services, direct access to business applications and an overview of current content about the company.

Monday Consulting acted as both implementation partner and consultant for the intranet project. With its agile project team, the firm took less than three months to set up the latest FirstSpirit release, sign off a design and implement the approved version. As a result, the Eppendorf Group was presented with a brand-new, world-spanning information portal in record time. The portal also offers a platform for future extensions with additional service modules.

The new release now adds the final touch to this intranet in terms of personalization. As a result, information on the intranet can now be personalized and therefore delivered as targeted content, which increases internal acceptance while improving the relevant reach of this content. Introducing personalization also enables the delivery of certain kinds of content that can only be made accessible to specific groups of people for regulatory reasons.

The personalization functionality is based on existing data drawn from the Workday HR management system already use in Eppendorf Group, as well as the Group’s user directory. When logged in, an Eppendorf employee will see content filtered by their location or company, for example. Editorial staff manage new and existing permissions directly on the content by working with its metadata in FirstSpirit ContentCreator. To ensure that all employees can view the information relevant to them – based on their location or department, for example – editors can simulate all of the user permissions with the help of the Multi-Perspective-Preview (MPP). Where layouts prevent protected images from being hidden in their entirety, the open source tool ‘ImageMagick’ is now used to render these images unviewable. This ensures that page structure is retained and the flow of text is not interrupted.

The relaunched Eppendorf Group intranet offers all of its employees worldwide an information portal that significantly improves internal communications. Thanks to the new options for content personalization, the intranet has now become even more relevant and can be strategically deployed at any company location.