Uwe Deller, Director of Communications, General Motors European Development
The slogan "Fresh Thinking for Better Cars" adopted by Opel, General Motor's largest European brand, was also the thought behind the creation of the new, web-based Intranet for the European development organization.
It is built on the philosophy of an avowed intention to innovate. Creative processes that should generate surprising solutions for the classical goal conflicts such as that between diversity and dynamics, should be constricted as little as possible by conventions.
Just as straightforwardly, the concept of the big IT picture, led to the establishment of a jumping-off point for a central knowledge management system. Since May 2005, there has been a uniform platform for information interchange and document research at some 7,000 computer workstations.
The goal of the extensively beneficial system is to serve as a central repository and source for the experiences and the knowledge of the vehicle development staff. What makes SSPR (Self-Service Publishing Retrieval) so special is that it offers both full text and metadata searches, based on a uniform storage structure. A further system highlight is the user interface: Fast, self-explanatory and secure, it offers excellent levels of user friendliness (window technique, context menus, drag & drop). Each content holder has the option to insert information without having to acquire any special programming knowledge.
"Right from the kick-off, we were focused on two goals", explains Uwe Deller, Director of Communications, General Motors European Development. "We wanted to expand the dialogue with the organization and contribute to further increasing the efficiency of our vehicle development function." To this end, the company looked for a web-based solution for internal communication purposes that offered significant improvements in the areas of duplicated data storage, cumbersome replication and the time-consuming search for documents or content. Whilst previously, trawling through test reports for individual parts for specific module groups required long search times, simply because of the depths of folders that had to be searched through, today, information is just a few clicks away. "Test Report Mounting Vectra Wheels" could be an example of a search query and the results would be delivered to your screen in a matter of seconds by SSPR.
The pre-launch preparation phase was characterized by the drawing up of clear specifications. "From the start, key factors were the involvement and inclusion of the original data owners, the consolidation of existing databases, storage systems and individual pieces of information and thus, the introduction of a central Intranet. Additionally, we implemented suitable measures to monitor the achievement of weekly project milestones and to continuously optimize the system", explains Deller.
Developed by inxire and built on inxire Digital Content, SSPR uses contemporary technology standards such as J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) and XML (Extensible Markup Language). The complete web content is available in a media-neutral XML format, based on DocBook standards. This creates the ideal conditions to be able to use reuse the content directly, in print and electronic media. A further advantage is that employees from the different departments are able to create and manage their own content themselves. Each access can be controlled through multifaceted user authorizations.
SSPR offers an efficient solution to radically simplify and consolidate heterogeneous storage structures. This has a positive effect both on the IT environment and on the business. Now, there is a central information pool available which, as an added bonus, offers a very low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). The system is scalable, has high availability and also offers stability and performance.
Thanks to the modular design, expansions can be installed while the system is running and the functional scope of the complete system can be expanded step by step. As a result, cross-functional teams benefit from integrated functions. It is possible to communicate with each other in virtual project rooms, to exchange data and to plan and execute projects. Every member of the team has the opportunity to access this data at any time and to participate proactively in the information interchange. Coordination effort is optimized, project management becomes more transparent and the bottom line is that cost savings are made in time and money.
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Uwe Deller
Director of Communications,
General Motors European Development
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