Glass facade of an office building in the evening, one floor with lit workstationsPhoto: Egor Komarov / Pexels

Case Study · Home appliances

Digital Workplace and Intranet for 60,000 Employees at BSH Hausgeräte

60,000 employees in 51 countries, 25 languages – and an intranet on SharePoint where only the editorial team could publish. The new one runs on Confluence and Linchpin: everyone can write, everyone sees tailored content, and it has won two awards.

The Company

BSH Hausgeräte GmbH is the largest manufacturer of home appliances in Europe and one of the world's leading companies in this industry. Around 40 manufacturing sites and a strong network of about 80 sales, production and service companies in around 50 countries form the foundation of BSH's customer-oriented business model.

Being the first choice for consumers worldwide drives the company and its employees. With its exceptional brands, high-quality products and superior solutions, BSH aims to improve people's quality of life.

The starting situation

In today's high-tech culture, information is spread across many places, and most employees have little insight into what their colleagues are currently working on. This makes communication harder and leads to limited collaboration. With Linchpin and Confluence, a technical solution is available that lets departments, teams and employees easily exchange information and stay up to date via an intranet.

The challenge: replacing the existing SharePoint intranet

The goal of the project was to expand the existing top-down intranet communication, giving not only the editorial team but every user the ability to contribute to a transparent, topic-centered intranet. For this, a platform based on Atlassian Confluence was built with the support of the Linchpin software, adapted to BSH's requirements. Linchpin adds the most important features of a modern, social intranet to Confluence's base functionality. Until the new intranet was realized, the company's own intranet was built on Microsoft SharePoint.

  • only top-down communication was possible
  • access was only possible internally via the network
  • there was no mobile access option or solution
  • content creation was very static and complicated
German Brand Award 2024, "winner" badge, next to a laptop showing the homepage of the BSH intranet

BSH German Brand Award for Brand Communication – Intranet and Collaboration

Read the press release
Peter Giglinger in a suit, a black-and-white portrait
Our recipe for successful implementation was: to be fast and have a cross-functional team with all the skills needed to achieve something great. That's why we built a team with motivated business stakeholders, IT staff and external partners – like XALT for the technical implementation and init for the concept – that can deliver daily through Agile and DevOps methods.
Peter GiglingerIT Business Consultant, BSH Hausgeräte GmbH

The Solution

Building an intranet based on Confluence and Linchpin, custom-developed Confluence apps and macros, integration into the company's own identity access management system (IAM), corporate branding, technical project coordination and operations concept.

Products used

Atlassian Confluence Data Center, Atlassian Crowd, Custom Developed SSO, Linchpin Intranet Suite, Advanced Image Gallery, Include+, K15t Translations, New Relic, Elastic Stack, Kibana, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

USPs of the New Digital Workplace and Intranet

Ahead of the project, BSH had formulated USPs (unique selling points) representing certain expected performance features of the new intranet, to set it apart from other projects and the competition. These unique selling points included:

Personalized User Experience

Entrance of the BSH headquarters: three people walking up the stairs, with the B/S/H/ sign on the white facade

The new intranet lets every user configure and personalize the displayed content and profile entirely to their wishes – for example the description of their job area, adding profile pictures and storing contact details.

Technical solutions were also implemented that make it possible to deliver tailored content to each user depending on their department, team or location.

Award graphic on a starry sky with the INKOMETA mark and the line Winner: B/S/H/ Intranet

BSH Wins the 2022 Inkometa Award for Best Intranet

BSH Hausgeräte won the Inkometa Award for best intranet in the Social Intranet / Collaboration Intranet category. The Inkometa Award is one of the most important awards for internal communication in Germany and is presented by SCM – School for Communication and Management.

Read the press release

Further Benefits of the New Intranet

The intranet is actively used at a company with more than 60,000 employees and is available in 25 languages and 51 countries. XALT delivered a tailor-made solution specifically for BSH's intranet project. This includes creating a custom theme for the intranet as well as developing several Atlassian apps to BSH's specifications.

  • visual design of the user interface based on B/S/H's corporate identity
  • distinguishing individual user groups into readers, editors and admins through updated user permission management (IAM – identity access management)
  • the intranet as a growing, flexible product – active input from users for continuous improvement through feedback

The Role of DevOps in the Intranet Project

DevOps best practices were used in B/S/H/'s intranet project. By integrating continuous integration and deployment, new features and code updates could be published on a consistent cycle – daily to weekly.

Quality control with pull requests and feature-branch test systems ensures all changes work correctly. This makes it possible to publish features without weeks of coordination and keep to the tight schedule.

More information about the project can also be found in init's success story: BSH Hausgeräte Digital Workplace.

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