2004 C.I.P.A. Winners

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Bombardier Aerospace

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Transforming a little-used Employee Portal into an Information ‘Hotspot’

Bombardier Inc., a global corporation headquartered in Canada, is a world-leading manufacturer of regional aircraft, business jets and rail transportation equipment. Its revenues for the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2003 were C$21.2 billion.

Although Bombardier was founded in 1942, the Aerospace Group was created in 1986 with the acquisition of Canadair and now employs 26,600 people in its four main places of business (Montréal, Toronto, Wichita and Belfast) and some twenty other sites around the world.

Challenge

With the reliability of its information questioned by employees, business units and departments, the original Bnet employee portal, which was launched in February 2002, was decidedly underutilized. To meet the needs of employees and the organization for a wider variety of timely, accurate information and quick access to tools, Bombardier undertook a complete redesign of it. This initiative involved the development of a low-cost, centralized point for obtaining the right information at the right time, and access to a broad spectrum of work tools. The new portal also needed to reflect the company’s brand image, while providing a single platform and a simple method for publishing the content from various business units and departments.

Objectives

As a single source for company information and work tools, the portal was expected to:

• enhance employee productivity by cutting search times in half
• reduce maintenance costs by consolidating 110 intranets
• boost employee con. dence in company-provided information about its operations and business environment
• achieve a user satisfaction rating of 70% with regard to information usefulness and relevance

Solution

Faced with a pressing need to keep staff informed, current, and equipped with the necessary tools, a communications strategy was devised that included a complete portal redesign.

Bnet Version 2.0 would need to be deployed on existing servers, and within a tight budget of just $125,000—an amount previously earmarked for technical resource salaries.

"Resource limitation was the greatest challenge related to this project," explains Project Leader, Viviane Duprès. Consequently, we had to be creative about how we went about solving problems. Project participants had to make a big commitment to see this through."

Before the technical transformation, the project team benchmarked best practices in ten other companies. Guidelines were defined from the data collected and based on the needs expressed by the Bombardier organization and its employees. Particular attention was paid to the portal’s ergonomics and browsability, an important consideration that would later affect employee usage and satisfaction levels.

Technically speaking, Version 2.0 of Bnet required that each page and application be entirely revamped. Content management tools required redesign for ease of use by non-technical users. To complicate matters further, the portal had to be compatible with several different platforms, a number of different versions of Internet Explorer and Netscape, and numerous, different Unix versions.

A survey of Bnet users conducted during the weeks after the launch produced the following findings, compared to an objective of 70%:

• 75.8% of users believed that Bnet simplified accessing information on the company, the industry and its competitors
• 83.2% of users reacted positively to the changes in the new version
• 80% of users found the information available via Bnet useful and relevant
• 73.4% of users said they would use the new version more often
• 79.6% of users found the new employee portal highly browsable

From a time and cost savings perspective, the company estimates that productivity gains realized totalled more than 30,000 hours—representing nearly $5 million of savings in less than ten months of use—based on average search time and employee salary.

Innovative Use of Technology

The project team was determined that the offering it was developing in-house would be comparable to employee portal and content management tools available on commercial platforms.

Accordingly, the underpinnings of Bnet 2.0 needed to be carefully considered. Whether one is looking at the home page or a portlet created by a business unit, each section is "dynamic". Content management tools draw data directly from databases and supply it automatically to the appropriate location. This ensures the organization and its employees are using the absolute latest information. Even the current weather and stock price are updated every fifteen minutes by scripts that read and transform data stored on the server from other Internet sites.

The powerful series of tools used to create and update the various portlets of the business units and departments require no technical expertise, making content managers entirely self-sufficient. This ease of use has led to a tremendous increase in content generation and added to the growing popularity of the portal and the relevance of its information.

"Today, our employee portal has evolved into a useful tool in which the information is constantly evolving and alive," notes Duprès. "That is what has helped make Bnet 2.0 an information hotspot."

A 2004 CIPA Winner!

For its exceptional and innovative application of Information Technology to solve real-world business problems and bring greater benefit to all its stakeholders, Bombardier Aerospace was awarded a 2004 Canadian Information Productivity Award of Excellence in the Efficiency & Operational Improvements category.

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