Products : Case Studies : Océ Technologies

Océ case study
How hard does your intranet work?

Founded in 1877 in the Netherlands, Océ is a printing and copying specialist offering a full range of products and services for the reproduction, distribution and management of documents. Océ has been successful in meeting the needs of a rapidly changing market by pushing technology boundaries and providing cutting-edge printing and copying solutions. This has been largely due to its considerable investment in R&D, where it spends on average 7% of its annual turnover.

Although it produces about three-quarters of the products it markets, part of Océ's growth strategy is through alliances. This has allowed the company to build close relationships with suppliers, partners and other co-developers, maximising economies of scale and specialised knowledge bases.

A new way of communicating

With offices in over 30 countries, some 21,000 staff as well as key supplier relationships to manage, Océ implemented a global intranet to enable better communications and knowledge management.

The global intranet is managed by the Information Management department, based in Venlo. With a staff of around 30, this department forms the central information hub for staff, as Hans Loonen, information professional at Océ, says, "we act as a corporate information broker supplying information to staff as and when they need it." While a large part of the department's job has traditionally been to carry out ad hoc search requests for staff, the intranet has enabled them to give end users a first line for information gathering. This means that end users can fulfil the majority of their straightforward queries themselves, turning to the Information Management department for consultancy and advice on more complex matters.

With a young workforce who has grown up with the Internet, intranet adoption across the organisation was relatively easy. To guarantee accuracy and timeliness are maintained, the Information Management department ensures that there is ownership of the individual content areas on the intranet.

Making the intranet work hard

Océ has been developing several initiatives to make its intranet work hard for the company.

One of the main business information tools available to staff globally via the intranet is a competitors database. This database provides all kinds of relevant competitor information including financial data and product announcements, and some of this information is sourced from Dialog's services. Only too aware of the importance to staff of this competitive intelligence data, "the Information Management department invests a lot of time in populating this database and making sure the information is accurate," according to Loonen.

The Information Management department has also been responsible for document management of internally generated reports, as Loonen says, "we're helping staff to get their knowledge onto paper". Together with two software companies in the Netherlands, the company has built a document management system that is capturing intellectual property and enabling it to be shared across the organisation via the intranet. The system assists staff in writing and standardising their reports. It then stores the reports electronically, enabling them to be easily searched, retrieved, distributed and printed.

The company is also looking into a 'yellow pages' system, where staff would be asked to publish a profile of themselves - who they are, what they do, their responsibilities and areas of expertise. This would become a valuable pool of knowledge to draw on and would be made available via the intranet. "The question is, how do you convince people to input their information?" comments Loonen. "A yellow pages system would be invaluable when you consider that people tend to ask their colleagues for help, but in a rapidly growing company it is virtually impossible to have personal relationships with everyone."

One forthcoming enterprise-wide content application project is the implementation of Dialog's Monitor service on Océ's intranet. Monitor is a key component of the Dialog Intranet Toolkit, which is based on a uniquely simple idea: to enable clients to custom build their own interfaces to the authoritative content from Dialog.

Working with Dialog, the Information Management department will set up highly customised profiles matching the information requirements of staff across the organisation. This can be done at the corporate-wide level, down to the specific requirements of departments, workgroups and individuals. Once defined, these custom-built profiles will then give staff the ability to retrieve and deliver relevant information direct via the intranet.

Key to the success of this project is the relationship that Océ continues to enjoy with Dialog, since their first involvement together began in 1977. As Loonen comments, "just as the relationships we have with our suppliers are key to Océ's success, maintaining a good working relationship with an information solutions company such as Dialog is critical to our success, in terms of developing powerful content tools to add value to our intranet."

According to Loonen, "We're making the intranet work hard for the organisation. Our goal is to empower staff to gain immediate access to accurate and authoritative information to ultimately help them do their jobs more effectively, and the tools that we are developing for the intranet should enable staff to share their knowledge across the organisation." He added, "according to Siebel, one of the world's major CRM players, nothing is more critical to a successful corporate strategy today than maintaining the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Some people say that we spoil our customers here in the Information Management department at Océ, but in our opinion we simply aim to satisfy them."

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