Wilo Pumps
About WILO AG
The Wilo Group develops, manufactures, and sells pumps and pump systems for private, commercial, industrial, and municipal segments for applications in heating, air conditioning, water supply, and sewage. Founded in 1872, the company now has subsidiaries in over 70 countries and around 7,ooo employees worldwide (1,700 in Germany alone).
Requirement:
Build a global Web infrastructure and keep it up to date efficiently. Like at so many medium-sized companies with international operations, the Web project leaders at WILO were faced with the challenge of providing a technical solution for meeting "foreign" markets and market requirements efficiently. With the solutions they had used so far this had not been possible. Some of the individual sites had considerable deviations in corporate design and content that differed greatly or was even out of date.
The challenge:
Bringing the subsidiaries to the level of the parent company. After the successful relaunch of WILO’s German and English Web site based on Open Text Management Server and Open Text Delivery Server, the sites of the companies in the other countries were to be consolidated and switched to the new system. All subsidiaries were to be given the opportunity of having a high-quality Web site.
At the same time, there was to be process optimisation between parent company and subsidiaries. In a time schedule that was closely coordinated between Open Text Premium Partner complexx.com and WILO AG, the country Web sites were implemented based on a master project in Open Text Web Solutions.
Taking advantage of the special Open Text Web Solutions localisation functions and standardised translation processes. Conventional Web sites that are translated "by hand" often encounter the problem of not being able to maintain the timeliness of the information in all languages offered. Complex processes are put in place to ensure the translation processes, but after a while these projects tend to fail. Therefore, all content was exported as XML structure from Open Text, translated in the central Translation Memory Star Transit, and finally reimported into Open Text Management Server. With this process, the translated text is imported directly into the respective country‘s own Web site. For automatically adopting content in the country Web sites from the master project, there is a plug-in available that enables the definition of mandatory and optional content and ensures automatic translation.
Integrating comprehensive product data in Open Text Web Solutions
Via an interface, all product data including images and PDF documents from the ASIM Product Information System (PIM) is used in Open Text Management Server, in which the editorial team can also work on the content online. The integrated use of information or documents from the PIM system in the Open Text Suite helps WILO provide country-specific and regional product information in multiple languages.
Faster rollout due to integrated training concept
Open Text Web Solutions is characterised by its intuitive use. Editors in hundreds of companies worldwide appreciate this, for they can present their content quickly and professionally after just a brief introduction and without any special technical skills. Due to the large number of languages and the short period of time allotted for the project, a customised training concept was developed for WILO to ideally connect training and rollout. At the training, all editors were given a pretranslated version of their country’s Web site and worked directly on the finishing touches of their Web site with the trainers. The enthusiasm for Open Text Web Solutions was evident when some countries had their own Web site with localised, even some individualised, offers and information online within just a few days of the training. The countries immediately took on the responsibility, and the editors quickly overcame any initial reservations they may have had.
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The Open Text Web Solutions Group has offices around the world.
