BOC Gases and the Google Search Appliance

BOC

Go Figure

2,000,000: Number of customers BOC Gases serves
20,000: Number of BOC Gases employees
30: The number of countries in which BOC Gases operates
68: The number of intranet sites integrated into a single search engine interface with the Google Search Appliance
2.5: The number of days it took to get the Google Search Appliance up and running
0: The number of days BOC Gases spent writing customized code

Solution “The Google Search Appliance with OneBox is the command line interface to our world... adding more content and additional One-box interfaces will only increase the value to our organization...”

Danny Perri, Business Process Consultant at BOC Gases

Business The Linde Group is a world leading industrial gases and engineering company with more than 53,000 employees working in around 70 countries worldwide. Following the acquisition of The BOC Group, the company has gases and engineering sales of approximately €12 billion. The strategy of The Linde Group is geared towards earnings-based growth and focuses on the expansion of its international business with forward-looking products and services.

Prior to acquisition, BOC selected the Google Search Appliance to provide its universal search capability. One of the top priorities for the new group is the integration of BOC within Linde. The Google Search Appliance is playing a key role in the integration by allowing knowledge to be leveraged across the new Linde Group.

Challenge Prior to becoming part of the Linde Group, BOC had realized the need to improve its own processes in order to help its customers increase output, to consistently deliver high quality materials and to meet stringent health, safety and environmental standards. The BOC Group’s ability to continuously improve depended largely on its capacity to develop and share best practices across the company; something that had been challenging for an organization whose information was published by thousands of employees in multiple languages across 115 intranet sites, a document management system and dozens of files shares in over 30 countries around the globe.

Due to these widespread, disparate information stores, BOC employees historically searched for information solely on their local intranets, hindering their ability to find the best solution available or worse —causing them to make the same errors others had already made and documented in the past. The company needed a single index that spanned its content globally, and they needed to integrate it with a search engine that would better support its employees.

BOC initially used Verity’s K2 Search Engine. Implementing K2 was fairly involved, requiring the procurement and hosting of servers, bringing in Verity consultants to install the software, followed by a period of experimentation and customization of search parameters. The system performed adequately but was costly and time consuming to configure; so BOC never exploited the system to its full potential. In 2006 the K2 licenses became due for renewal and BOC took the opportunity to review their search strategy. The review included a comparison of search engines and the Google Search Appliance was identified as an attractive option for a number of reasons, including:

  • Cost
  • Easy implementation (stick it in a rack, plug it in and tell it what to index)
  • Very low maintenance
  • Reduced change impact (most employees use Google.com for Web search)
  • Excellent search results

Solution BOC chose Google and the Google Search Appliance. The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution for enterprise information that offers superior relevancy in results combined with the usability of google.com. Due to the ease of implementation of the Appliance, BOC was able to install and configure the Google Search Appliance in less than two days. BOC employees were able to quickly and easily conduct unified searches across all of the organization’s content to which they are allowed access – knowing they would retrieve extremely relevant results. With the Google Search Appliance BOC placed the entire organization’s knowledge at each person’s fingertips.

In addition to search capabilities, the Google Search Appliance offered additional benefits to improve BOC Gases’ information efficiency:

  • State-of-the-art security access that reflects each user’s credentials, providing search results based on established access parameters.
  • Language transparency enables users to access valuable information from around the world, as users easily search across content in any language
  • Reporting tools provide insight into how employees are using search to drive business
  • Mobile capabilities enable a global, traveling workforce to access the search engine from the field, arming employees with valuable corporate information regardless of their location.

Results “Out of the box, BOC received better, more relevant results from the Google Search Appliance than ever before,” explained Danny Perri, Business Process Consultant at BOC Gases. Within the first two hours, the search engine received over 100 hits. The appliance enables best practice information to be shared across the company’s offices worldwide. Now a field officer can quickly access information about any location’s products, and a manager can compare supply contracts from all over the world.”

The Google Search Appliance has become a key enabler for BOC’s Knowledge Management strategy. According to Perri, “85% of the company’s knowledge is in people’s heads,” a problem shared by many organizations today. To counteract this problem, BOC developed an Identity Management System that allows employees to enter information about the fields in which they work and their areas of expertise. This employee information resides in a database that is now indexed with the Google Search Appliance. Google OneBox for Enterprise, a feature of the Google Search Appliance, delivers expert locater results at the top of any relevant search query, thus enabling BOC employees to simultaneously search documents and people to find business-critical knowledge. For example, an executive researching a customer utilized OneBox to identify an employee who had previously worked there. A quick phone call provided the executive with valuable first-person insight into the company.

The more enterprise systems that are integrated with the Google Search Appliance, the more quickly BOC employees can find the right answers to their questions. “Now that we have the right search partner, we can continue to build on our vision to integrate all BOC information worldwide,” said Perri. BOC is already planning a OneBox integration with their global asset management system.

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