KONE

Manufacturer Implements New Global Web Presence to Serve Customers, Help Drive Sales

KONE is a leading elevator and escalator manufacturer. The global company sees the Internet as a channel to provide information needed by customers, but its content management solution made it difficult to keep Web sites around the world current. KONE built a new global Web presence—including 48 Web sites in 16 languages—based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Today, content coordinators around the globe can easily keep Web sites up-to-date—a capability that, when combined with the search functionality provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007, enables prospective customers to find the information they need and is helping drive new sales. KONE also deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 for a new global intranet, which will enable the company to support both internal and external Web sites with a single technology solution and skill set.

 

Situation

KONE is a global leader in manufacturing elevators, escalators, and innovative solutions for modernization and maintenance. The company strives to offer the best people-flow experience by developing and delivering solutions that enable people in buildings to move smoothly, safely, comfortably, and without waiting. KONE’s key customers are builders, building owners, facility managers, and developers; the company also works closely with architects and consultants. KONE has approximately 250,000 customers globally, of which the majority are maintenance customers that account for roughly 60 percent of KONE’s revenues.

SharePoint Server 2007 offered the ideal combination of Web content management capabilities, search features, and vendor support. Simon Green Director, Sales Development, KONE

KONE sees strong potential in the Web as a channel to provide technical specifications and other information needed by customers. “People don’t come to our site by accident; they want information, and the online channel is well-suited for providing it,” says Simon Green, Director, Sales Development at KONE and business owner of the company’s customer-facing online properties. “However, our previous global Web solution was dated—and not up to the task. We wanted to do more than it was capable of supporting.”

Deployed about 7 years ago, that solution was based on Vignette and Solaris, with third-party software for search. Its main problem was the high level of expertise—and effort—required to publish content. “Our old Web solution was very user-unfriendly, requiring a significant level of technical knowledge to change anything but basic text,” says Green. “Content contributors couldn’t drag and drop content, and couldn’t see what a Web page would look like until after it was published. Because it was so hard to publish content, the Web as a means of reaching customers was discounted out-of-hand. We have approximately 45 Web content coordinators across the world, and needed to provide a solution that they would want to use.”

Search capabilities were fairly poor as well, making it hard for customers to find what they needed even if that content was on the site. In addition, because it was based on technologies from multiple vendors, the company’s global Web presence was expensive to maintain, required varied and specialized IT skill sets, and was hard to tune for good performance.

Solution

KONE chose Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its new strategic environment for Web content management, and has since rolled out its new Web presence on Office SharePoint Server 2007 worldwide. “SharePoint Server 2007 offered the ideal combination of Web content management capabilities, search features, and vendor support,” says Green. “We examined several options but SharePoint Server 2007 came out ahead on all fronts.”

Since implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007 for our Internet presence, we’ve seen a significant increase in the quantity of sales leads from the Web—and in the quality of those leads as well. Simon Green Director, Sales Development, KONE

The company’s adoption of Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its new global standard began in early 2007, when KONE began looking at the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. “Given the strategic importance of the solution and the scope of a worldwide deployment, it was important to have a technology partner of a certain size,” says Green. “We briefly considered open-source software, but realized that it would only get us so far—and that we also needed a solution with a solid product roadmap and strong support ecosystem. Lots of medium-sized companies offer Web content management solutions, but most of them have fairly weak product roadmaps, and there’s no way to be sure those vendors will be around in a few years.”

KONE validated its decision to use Microsoft software through a two-week Proof-of-Concept workshop, during which Microsoft Services built a simple imitation of KONE.com on Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Everything went well, and we really liked working with the Microsoft team,” says Green. “We saw that we could implement a fully functional Web site very fast, and content coordinators really liked the Web content publishing capabilities; they could see using SharePoint Server as a part of their daily routine. We also saw that it would be easy to support multiple languages and to build standardized templates from which new Web sites could easily be created.”

Development and Rollout

After the Proof-of-Concept, KONE assembled the rest of the team it would need, augmenting the technical architect/lead developer from Microsoft Services with project management resources from Accenture and developers from Avanade. The development team implemented a continuous integration methodology using Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, with automated builds every evening.

“When I came into work each morning, I could see the progress that had been made the previous day,” says Green. “Constant iteration provided the opportunity for lots of feedback and was quite valuable to me as the project’s business promoter, in that I was able to easily keep other stakeholders up-to-date. We’re an engineering company, so people like to see what’s been done instead of just hearing about what’s planned.”

The project team staged the solution’s rollout by country, beginning with the United States in February 2008. A few months later, the centralized solution supported an additional four countries. “Our goal was to roll out our core solution globally within a year, and we met that objective,” says Green.

New Global Web Presence

Today, with its worldwide rollout now complete, the solution hosts 48 different Web sites in 16 languages, as well as a corporate site. Combined, the sites are one of the largest sources of leads into the KONE CRM system. Edit-in-place content management capabilities enable content coordinators around the globe to easily maintain the solution’s 12,000 pages of content. “Content coordinators are usually the junior people on marketing teams,” says Green. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 is easy enough to use that they’ve been able to come up to speed and start publishing content with a single day of virtual training.”

KONE also is taking advantage of the built-in search functionality in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Through the Enterprise Search feature, customers can quickly and easily access more than 16,000 documents and drawings that KONE has indexed. “SharePoint Server search works better out-of-the-box than the search functionality on our old site did after extensive tuning,” says Green. “Within the next six months, we plan to take advantage of some of the more advanced search features in SharePoint Server—such as Best Bets—to further improve the search experience.”

From an architectural perspective, the solution resides on five 64-bit HP ProLiant BL465c G1 server computers. One application server runs the Windows Server® 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition operating system; two Web servers run Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard x64 Edition; and two database servers run the Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition data management software and Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise x64 Edition.

Current Technology Initiatives

With its new Web presence fully deployed, KONE is busy building upon it to implement extranet sites for strategic customers. KONE also recently replaced the company’s existing SAP-based intranet portal with a new global corporate intranet based on Office SharePoint Server 2007, with country-specific intranet sites to follow in the coming months. “One of the key reasons we chose SharePoint Server 2007 for our Internet presence was the ability to use it for our corporate intranet as well,” says Green. “Now that the Internet and intranet solutions are fully deployed, we still feel that we’ve made the right decision.”

Benefits

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, KONE has revitalized its use of the Web as a means of reaching out to customers. Today, content coordinators around the globe can easily keep their respective Web sites current—a capability that, when combined with the improved search features provided by SharePoint Server, enables prospective customers to find the information they need and is helping KONE to drive incremental sales. “We recently had a big agency review of our Web site, and they said it went from among the worst in our industry to among the best,” says Green. “I’m quite happy with how everything turned out, and with the business results we’re now seeing.”

Fast, Easy Content Publishing

Part of any solution’s reliability depends on the support provided by its vendor, and… we’re glad that we chose Microsoft. Sirkka Tuominen Project Manager, KONE

For KONE, the greatest benefit of its new solution is an editing environment that enables nontechnical personnel to quickly and easily publish content on the Web—including the ability to preview new or changed content before it goes live. “From a content publishing perspective, SharePoint Server 2007 is radically better than our old solution—people couldn’t wait to start using it,” says Green. “Furthermore, as a Microsoft product, they understood it straightaway, with many users already having experience with SharePoint team sites. Content coordinators around the world now can focus on which information customers need, without having to worry about the technical intricacies of publishing that content.”

As proof of the site’s easy content publishing capabilities, Green cites the frequency with which content is updated. “Before, most content coordinators updated their Web sites once per month, and the process usually took a day,” he says. “Today, people update the same sites two or three times per week, and only spend a few hours per month doing so. The Web is now a channel for reaching customers that we can work with.”

Improved Customer Service and Sales

More current Web content—and improved search capabilities that help customers more easily find what they need—are helping drive incremental sales for KONE. “Since implementing Office SharePoint Server 2007 for our Internet presence, we’ve seen a significant increase in the quantity of sales leads from the Web—and in the quality of those leads as well,” says Green. “In fact, we’re seeing tens of millions of dollars in sales opportunities per year come from the Web. An improved Web presence also helps us in the market in other ways, in that we spend a lot of time on the user experience for KONE products themselves—and user experience we provide on the Web only helps reinforce the value of our brand.”

Strong Reliability and Scalability

With the scalability provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007, KONE is able to support its global Web presence with a single, consolidated solution. A single farm of five server computers hosts all 48 Web sites, 12,000 pages of content, and 16,000 indexed documents. “Being able to support our global Web presence with a single solution helps minimize costs,” says Green. “SharePoint Server is scalable in other ways as well, in that it only takes hours to bring up an entirely new Web site.”

Reliability has been strong as well. “The solution has been quite stable,” says Sirkka Tuominen, Project Manager at KONE. “We ran into a few early problems related to our internal network infrastructure, but they were all overcome. Microsoft Services has been great at helping out, even if the problems were not SharePoint Server–related. Part of any solution’s reliability depends on the support provided by its vendor, and this is an area where we’re glad that we chose Microsoft.”

Synergy Across Internet and Intranet Solutions

Moving forward, thanks to its decision to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 for both its Internet and intranet sites, KONE will benefit from strong synergy across the two solutions. “With a single technology platform and tool set for both our Internet and intranet sites, we’ll require fewer technology specialists and consultants,” says Green. “Having both solutions on SharePoint Server also will help reduce system administration costs, increase software development synergies, and allow the same people we’ve already trained for content management on our public-facing Web sites to maintain our intranet sites. I’m not sure we could accomplish all of that with any other product.”

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www.kone.com