Management Summary
Nowadays modern businesses have to manage a large number of documents while at the same time keeping their employees up to date by always providing the latest information. John Deere in Mannheim relies on CONTENS and the integrated DMS-solution windream for its intranet. New content is easily and quickly published and business-relevant documents are available to the entire staff in the latest version at any time. The strong plus points of the combination of CONTENS and windream are a wide range of functions, easy handling, and high acceptance by the editors.
Situation
The employees at the John Deere plants in Mannheim, Zweibrücken, and Bruchsal produce modern tractors and harvesters using state-of-the-art technology. For the administration of daily used documents such as manuals, instruction sheets, and service brochures, the company uses the document management software (DMS) windream.
For the creation of a new intranet, the IT experts at John Deere in Mannheim looked for a powerful content management system (CMS) which allows new information to be swiftly and easily published while also guaranteeing reliable global access to the implemented DMS.
Solution
The people in charge at John Deere decided in favor of the content management platform CONTENS. From the beginning, they were won over by the user-friendly interface of the CMS, with which new content is created and published in almost no time at all.
The John Deere IT department emphasized the need of closely connecting CONTENS to the already existing document management system windream. The DMS is especially characterized by easy handling and low implementation costs. The employees at John Deere had been archiving and managing relevant information with windream for several years. The aim was to make the business documents globally accessible to all of the more than 2,500 employees at the John Deere plant in Mannheim.
Therefore CONTENS developed an interface to fit windream. Editors can now access the content of the DMS directly via the CONTENS interface and make it available to the intranet with only a few mouseclicks.
The access to the windream DMS via the user interface of CONTENS offers various advantages to the personnel at John Deere:
- Uniform access to all business-relevant documents
- Avoidance of redundancies by direct linkage of documents
- Guarantee of constantly updated documents by linkage to the latest version of a document
In the meantime, the intranet at John Deere in Mannheim has established itself as a fast and convenient information medium for all employees. More than 170 editors contribute to it every day and create content for their colleagues. As a positive side-effect of the introduction of CONTENS and windream, the amount of internal e-mails which had been mainly used for the distribution of documents until then, could be clearly reduced.
Due to the successful progress of the project, the John Deere plants in Bruchsal and Zweibrücken now use CONTENS for their intranets as well.