Name of the organization using the intranet

B. Braun Melsungen AG

Name of service provider

//SEIBERT/MEDIA GmbH, Wiesbaden, Germany - http://www.seibert-media.com

Brief description of the organization and the service provider

B. Braun Melsungen AG is a medical and pharmaceutical device company with over 50,000 employees in 61 countries. With their motto "Sharing Expertise" they help improve therapies and work flows in clinics and practices and thus increase safety of patients, doctors and care personnel. In 2014, the company celebrated it's 175th anniversary as one of the leading health care providers in the world.

Since 1996, //SEIBERT/MEDIA has been a professional internet service provider with offices in Wiesbaden and San Diego. With over 100 employees in agile, interdisciplinary teams, //SEIBERT/MEDIA is Germany's biggest provide for Atlassian software tools, that support communication and collaboration in organizations. //SEIBERT/MEDIA is the fifth largest Atlassian partner worldwide.

Brief description of the Intranet

The B. Braun Knowledge Center (BKC) is based on Atlassian Confluence which had started out as a pure enterprise wiki and has developed to a social collaboration platform over the last years. The goal of the project was to move away from an editing system and towards a collaboration system, matching the company claim of 'Sharing Expertise'. The requirements were availability in various languages, location based navigation and personalized news feeds. With the motto 'Make it Yours', a comfortable, adaptable and intuitive knowledge and collaboration center and an expert network have been created as BKC in the company, supporting international exchange and a completely personalized user experience in the intranet.

Design adaptation: BKC comes with an individual theme that matches the corporate design of the company, in order to convey a familiar image to the employees. In addition, various usability and functional improvements of the Confluence standard interface were made, in order to reduce complexity and improve usability of BKC as a work tool for the users.

Simple content creation: New content can be created with a click from any intranet page. The native Confluence editor might well be the best available in the market. It offers all features of basic text editing, supports multi media, attachments, tables and diagrams and offers a real 'What you see is what you get'. Content is grouped in spaces and can be structured hierarchically into any required depth.

Global navigation: The plugin Navigation Menu Editor that was developed for this project supports freely configurable global navigation menus for different user groups and locations, including a multi language support. The users are displayed exactly the navigation content that is relevant to them.

Expert network: The plugin Custom User Profile which was also developed and realized for this project enhances BKC by a corporate expert search that allows for a quick identification of the right contact person in a particular field of expertise.

Personal Cockpit/Dashboard: On the personalized BKC home page the user has access to individual information feeds. The double track news concept ensures on one hand that the company can communicate news targeted to all employees or to specific user groups (i.e. based on language, country, or location). It also allows each user to subscribe to their personal news stream and intranet content, depending on their interests.

Individual App Store: Every user can directly access all internal and external applications that are relevant to them by one click from the BKC home page. The user can choose which applications are displayed.

Mobile version: BKC has an individual mobile theme and it's basic functions are usable from mobile divices (smartphone, tablet).

Integration of company search: the search function in BKC does not only allow for a search in the intranet but also finds content in external systems ("Google within the company").

Open by default is an effective knowledge management and one of the main applications of BKC. The use of BKC is not limited to certain user groups. Each employee can read, create and edit content, comment and share and connect with other users.

The BKC was rolled out in 61 countries between 2013 and 2014 and is currently available in 11 languages.

What makes the intranet particularly interesting or usable?

Low cost, high usability, world-class rich text editor

Short Summary of USP: The technology basis with Atlassian Confluence and the Linchpin intranet suite is extremely affordable, yet powerful. It has a very high usability out of the box. And the rich text editor of Confluence is probably best in class, even better than the editor in Google Docs. 

A lean system was created through individualization and reduction of complexity, which offers functions, content and apps that are relevant and helpful for the user. The intranet is thus a personal cockpit for the daily work without overhead.

BKC integrates requirements of a classical intranet as well as intranet 2.0 requirements. A targeted top down communication via news streams, a global navigation and an individual content display based on user profiles turn Confluence into the comprehensive intranet solution BKC.

Pages and spaces with sensitive information can be restricted to certain users or user groups via granular rights, but generally content in BKC is 'open by default'. The BKC thus builds the foundation for an organic knowledge management without bottlenecks and supports an employee based trust and collaboration culture, instead of deterring with restrictions. 

These concepts are supported by success:

By the end of 2014:

• 10,270,000 page impressions
• 33,000 intranet pages (+ 2,300 per month)
• 29,000 likes, 4,500 comments

The employees adapted the intranet and made it theirs.

Screenshots and Descriptions