Miele

Standardization, flexibility, simplicity: OpenText offers the right balance

“Global brand management on the internet is a major challenge,” said Eric Huxohl, IT developer at Miele and responsible for the OpenText project. “A Miele web page must be immediately recognizable as such, regardless of the country from which a user accesses it. The product descriptions must always be consistent, and at the same time, the web presence must be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the different strategies in terms of market approach and the addition of country-specific peculiarities by our local employees without too much effort.” In Miele’s traditional markets, such as Germany, Scandinavia and Australia, the company has long been established as a premium manufacturer. When addressing customers online, the focus is, therefore, on individual products, product categories and product features. In emerging markets such as India or China, the priority is to firmly establish the premium brand. Online communication on the group and products is enhanced with company-independent information—such as information on specific food and beverages, recipes or laundry tips– and particular consideration is given to local and national differences.

“It is essential that flexibility is not neglected in all standardized work that is necessary for quality assurance. However, the easier it is to operate a Web Content Management system, the more flexibly it can be used. OpenText Web Site Management meets all three requirements: quality, flexibility and ease of use,” Huxohl emphasized.

Central editing and SAP® integration

“Around 300 active editors are working with OpenText Web Site Management. They are distributed across 33 countries at present. In many cases, product managers manage websites alongside their actual tasks. It is good that they do not need any programming knowledge for this but can work with an interface that displays everything as it will be published on the internet,” said Huxohl.

It is not just the input screen of the OpenText WCM solution that helps to prevent errors—this is also achieved by the design that is specified centrally within the system. In addition, the five employees of central editing in Germany provide a great deal of content that is then just translated into the local language in the relevant locations. Furthermore, the product data is only managed centrally in Miele’s SAP® system and is then transferred automatically to OpenText Web Site Management. “This minimizes the work for our editors, eliminates sources of error, ensures that information is up-to-date across countries and also guarantees consistency in Miele’s online presence,” Huxohl explained. “This is pure efficiency. Compliance is also guaranteed, as a result, because the central management of product data means that energy values, for example, are displayed correctly across countries in accordance with EU standards.”

An editor in just three days

The intelligent input screens of OpenText Web Site Management and the automatic transfer of data from the SAP system means that extremely short training periods are possible for editors. “In general, only three days of training are necessary to familiarize colleagues with the OpenText solution and how it works with our SAP system,” explained Huxohl. “Incidentally, the fact that it is so user-friendly was one of the main reasons that we initially introduced the OpenText WCM solution over seven years ago. Since then, the system has proven to be extremely reliable and robust—we only submitted five support requests to OpenText in that entire period.” The large range of functions support editors in their day-to-day work and Miele can add various functions through the user interface. At present, data from sources such as SAP are imported directly into the editing system. In the future, product data from SAP will be imported directly into the delivery server.

OpenText Web Site Management is unparalleled

“Despite multiple version changes over the past seven years, at no time have we considered changing providers,” reported Huxohl. “Then, as now, we believe that no system is better than OpenText Web Site Management and OpenText solutions are much better than other well-known solutions, including those from the open source world. Licence costs are just one thing—the total cost of ownership is another. This is also why, in the course of the upgrade to version 10, we are going to migrate the 14 remaining locations that are not yet working with the central WCM system to OpenText Web Site Management.” Miele does not anticipate any performance problems, even if the number of editors around the world increases again, because OpenText Web Site Management offers a clustering ability. In the medium term, Miele is looking to increase from the current two systems to three.