Project running since 2012

The client

B. Braun Melsungen AG supplies the global healthcare market with products for anesthesia, intensive medicine, cardiology, extra corporeal blood treatment and surgery. It offers services for hospitals, general practitioners and the global healthcare sector. In 2014, B.Braun Melsungen celebrated its 175th birthday and is present in over 61 countries with approximately 50,000 employees.

The assignment

Development of a Confluence based intranet: Away from the editorial system towards a more open collaboration system, in line with the company claim: "Sharing Expertise". Multiple languages, a location-specific navigation, as well as location-specific content were among the key requirements for the international corporation.

The solution

The B. Braun Knowledge Center (BKC) is a social intranet space, which is based on Atlassians Social-Collaboration-System Confluence. Via BKC, a user friendly, adjustable and intuitive knowledge and collaboration center, as well as a expert network was created within B.Braun Melsungen AG. It also promotes international knowledge transfer.

Design Configuration: The BKC is equipped with an individual Confluence Theme that mirrors the corporate design of the corporation with the purpose to provide the employees with a more familiar look and feel of the application. Additionally, the system was optimized with a great variety of usability and functional adjustments of the Confluence standard dashboard to facilitate the use of the BKC as a work tool. 

Global Navigation: Our Navigation Menu Editor plugin supports individually configured global navigation menus for different user groups and locations, including multilingual support. Thus, the user sees exactly the navigation content, that is relevant for the specific user.

Expert Network: The Custom User Profile plugin we developed, expands the BKC into an expert search for the entire global group. It identifies the right contact person for a specific area of expertise.

Personal Cockpit/Dashboard: On the personal BKC Landing page, the user has the possibility to add individual news feeds, that share relevant information. When starting the system, the user receives all current and relevant news and has the option to subscribe to individual news feeds.  

Individual Appstore: The user can access all personal important internal and external applications via the BKC dashboard with just one click. The user can individually select the applications to be displayed. 

Protection from Simultaneous Editing: The //SEIBERT/MEDIA-Plugin Edit Lock notifies any user trying to edit a document that is currently being edited by another user. This helps minimize conflicts in editing and lost entries, as well as the frustration that comes along with it.  

Mobile Version: The BKC has an individual mobile theme and is thus accessible from mobile devices (tablet, smartphone, etc). 

Enterprise Search: The BKC Search function does not only allow the search within the application, but also finds content of external systems ("Google within the business") 

Technology

Confluence, Java

Development

  • Agile Approach with the implementation
  • Agile Pilot Project has been successful for the whole corporation
  • User Centered Design through early involvement of the end user

Screenshots

To see the layouts in full resolution, please right click on the image and select "open image" and click on the layout with the magnifying glass.

Dashboard 

The dashboard elements were configured according to the requirements of B.Braun (News Channel Updates, Highlights-Box, Sidebar, ...).

Detail page

The confluence theme was adapted to the corporate design of B.Braun (toolbar icons, fonts, teaser box, ...).

Enterprise search

Besides the actual knowledge center, there is a comprehensive enterprise search, which includes documents from external systems, products and experts.

Presentation from Atlassian Summit 2014

Noteworthy

Internal success 

Very positive feedback by users and management globally.

(Videos in German - please turn on automatically translated subtitles)

Numbers July 2013 until April 2014:

  • 220 collaboration spaces with information and know how 
  • 900 international users have created more than 29,000 pages 
  • 280,000 logins (Ø 31,110 per month)
  • 6,200,000 page visits (Ø 700,000 per month) 
  • 3,000 blog posts, 17,000 likes, 3,000 comments
  • 68,000 app downloads
  • 14,000 news channel subscriptions

External success

The Social Intranet of B.Braun Melsungen AG was nominated for the Deutscher Preis für Online-Kommunikation  (German Award for Online Communication).
Additionally, B.Braun Melsungen AG has received a presentation / talk slot at the  Atlassian Summit 2014 in San José to present the BKC to the international Atlassian community. 

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