Central platform for supporting strategic business objectives
Project description
With an average of 66,000 employees and 600 branch offices in over 300 cities (as of 2008), Randstad is the leading personnel services firm in Germany. In addition to traditional temporary employment services, Randstad's portfolio also includes Professional Services, Personnel Placement, HR Solutions and In-House Services divisions, among others.
Randstad entrusted BTEXX with the design and implementation of its “YOU2” employee portal: The intranet serves as the company's central communications and process platform for supporting strategic business objectives. Created in the style of modern Web 2.0 Internet sites, the portal improves project communication, serves as an intranet for specialist divisions and facilitates the exchange and transfer of knowledge within the company.
“The new “YOU2” employee portal enables us to reach a much larger audience. The new platform allows us to make information more interesting and makes it possible to more accurately present and more precisely select this information. In addition to using the platform for project communication, as a specialist division intranet or for exchanging knowledge in general, in the coming years we will also direct our focus to the implementation of Web 2.0 technologies and the associated changes within the workplace,” says ICT Director Werner Schultheis, Randstad Deutschland GmbH & Co.KG
Concept
For Randstad “YOU2”, BTEXX developed its own applications – which were custom tailored to meet the company's specific requirements. The Randstad news application, for instance, provides convenient editing of group news articles. News items are categorized during creation according to time and division. Labeling a message “top news” triggers a function that automatically publishes the news item on the portal homepage. As a special feature, what is known as an “Insight” page was designed, which appears before the actual portal homepage: BTEXX easyWCM makes it possible to position the news item of the day there.
A telephone book application was developed for faster provision of HR information. It allows access to data from the SAP HR system. Individual employee business cards or data from Randstad branch offices are centrally managed and presented in a well-structured manner. Moreover, the use of SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search as the standard enables comprehensive searches of content modules and business data.
Design
The “YOU2” portal was developed for communication within the Randstad group and offers a central information and communications platform in the style of modern enterprise 2.0 portals. The platform not only facilitates improved exchange of information, but also increases efficiency: Role and user concepts make it possible to assign web content, collaboration tools and business data to the appropriate user groups.
With the introduction of SAP portal technology, the Randstad intranet interface was completely redesigned. The portal interface was adapted to the Randstad corporate design according to precisely defined design guidelines.
Ready-made BTEXX easyWCM forms featuring predesigned text, iViews and portal pages facilitate CD-oriented work. In the future editors and other portal users will no longer need to worry about adhering to CD guidelines.
Technology
The goal was to fully replace the existing “Randstadnet” with the new “YOU2” intranet concept. The project's most significant innovation was the replacement of two separate technical platforms. The aim was to unite the SAP process world and the previous Lotus Notes-based intranet under one roof. In the future, the new, leading technology will be the SAP NetWeaver Portal enhanced with the “BTEXX easyWCM” Content Management System. The software makes it simple to provide web content, conventional SAP applications, modern web applications (Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs), documents, etc.
In addition to building an intranet with SAP, btexx also helped integrate collaboration tools. Inspired by the motto: “Work together”, team rooms based on SAP's Collaboration Rooms were provided within the SAP portal's light framework.
