http://www.liebherr.com

Liebherr is one of the biggest manufacturers of construction machinery and provides many technically demanding products and services. The products range from cranes and diggers to flight control and tilting systems to refrigerators. The Liebherr Group has more than 22,000 employees worldwide in more than 100 companies from Afghanistan to Cyprus.

Challenge

Running as a decentralised entity, Liebherr’s numerous business units operate independently to ensure that each company can quickly respond to market challenges. Prior to implementation, each division within the Liebherr group operated its own Web site, which in turn was handled by external providers from a central location. As the Liebherr Web site grew and evolved over time, current processes surrounding updates and workflows became outdated, complex and impractical. This was due to the existing platform technology, which used Microsoft ASP and HTML pages. As a result, the response time required to perform basic maintenance and ensure that content was fresh and updated rose dramatically, increasing both the cost and time required to make regular changes to the site. Finally, it affected the Liebherr branding, which was focused on creating a single, homogenous identity for the entire group.

Requirements

• Implementation of a professional CMS to optimise editorial processes
• Gaining of independence from external service providers
• Provision of a central Web infrastructure
• Strengthening of corporate design on all sites
• Management of all product data in a database

Business Drivers

Today, leading manufacturers are under tremendous pressure to stay current with trends and swings in competition. With shorter time to market cycles and more innovative products and competitive pricing flooding the markets, it has become harder for manufactures to distinguish themselves from competition based solely on pricing structure and fast delivery times. As the Internet becomes more important for companies looking to differentiate their products and services to clients, creating a unified and homogenous online brand becomes increasingly imperative for providing value to customers.

Investing in a solution that would centralise their site’s infrastructure to allow easy editing and administration of Web content would allow Liebherr to achieve their primary goals:

Maintaining a site that created a strong brand and sent one, unified message to customers looking to use their equipment and machinery. Empowering their content users with the ability to create and post their own content on the Web, while centrally managing data from all departments would provide the flexibility Liebherr needed to support their growing companies. Another key factor for choosing a Web content management solution was the ability to easily manage different language variants.

With companies operating on nearly every continent, Liebherr staff needed a way to quickly translate content in several different languages without the help of an external firm or IT department.

Liebherr staff needed a Web site that would allow them to:

• Effectively respond to constant changes in the marketplace by quickly posting fresh and relevant content
• Attain autonomy from the external Web firms that Liebherr staff relied upon for managing Web updates
• Centrally control branding by housing all information from all Web sites into one place
• Build and maintain a strong, unified brand across all language variants and country Web sites

Solution

Open Text Web Solutions was chosen by Liebherr for the flexibility and ease of use it provides users for managing complex Web projects. With Open Text, Liebherr staff, who have little or no technical skills, can easily update content from their respective locale, increasing employee productivity and improving response time to rapid market changes.

Since Open Text’s web solutions requires very little training for end users, Liebherr also benefited from the time and cost savings that would have otherwise been spent to acclimate staff on a system that was overly complex or required extensive coding skills. There are a number of other benefits that Open Text provided Liebherr. The Liebherr Group had a number of objectives that included integration with applications that would allow them to maintain everything from customer contacts to product information that was posted on the Web sites. Liebherr has sales and production locations throughout the world, so easy maintenance of this information for its diverse product base was essential. Other elements of their project included developing an interactive job portal where applicants could submit resumes online and easily administer hundreds of domains that comprised their multiple Web sites.

With Open Text Web Solutions, Liebherr’s Web sites were able to:

• Empower each department with the ability to centrally localise and post their own content within a short amount of time
• Easily create over 60,000 Web pages in 7 different languages, creating a more consistent looking brand across all Web sites
• Eliminate the need for third party Web vendors, significantly reducing overhead costs

Results

With extensive functionality at their fingertips, Liebherr was able to seamlessly create Web sites in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese within record time. For example, developing the Chinese language variant, a Web site that made up 35,000 pages, took only two months. By creating a multilingual site that allowed Liebherr staff to easily deliver the right content to users within a context that made sense for their needs, Liebherr strengthened its communication with business partners and customers online.

Open Text’s flexible infrastructure and user intuitive interface omitted the need to use the external service providers that Liebherr had previously depended upon for updates. Reducing unnecessary overhead costs and allowing content producers to update and manage the content they create has increased both employee productivity, as well as customer satisfaction.

Obvious advantages of using Open Text Web Solutions:

• Easing the burden of the individual departments on all tasks involving Web design
• More up-to-date content due to local content maintenance by the departments themselves
• More consistent Web site in compliance with corporate identity
• Multilingual presentation of content, even in Chinese and Russian due to Unicode