Taylor Woodrow Construction And Google Team Up To Improve Employee Intranet

Published 9th August 2007

Google Search Appliance support employees in meeting compliance regulations...

7th August 2007 – Taylor Woodrow Construction has adopted the Google Search Appliance as the enterprise search technology to improve the efficiency of the company Intranet.

Taylor Woodrow Construction’s business system team maintain the corporate Intranet, internally known as Tayweb. The Intranet is an important tool for employees not only in the UK but also across the companies markets in the UK, Europe and Ghana. Despite the importance of Tayweb, employees could not always locate information easily and the usage of the Intranet was steadily decreasing.

The team set about an improvement project called ‘Tayweb Personalisation’ to improve the users experience of finding information on the Intranet. The existing search function was unable to locate documents or search web pages held outside the Tayweb content management system (TCMS) and therefore a new search function was needed. The limitations of the existing technology was also impacting internal processes and procedures making it difficult for employees to achieve the required level of consistency across the organisation; potentially leading to compliance regulation breaches.

The team researched the enterprise search market and found from all the competitors that the Google Search Appliance met all of the company’s requirements. The Google Search Appliance was integrated with Tayweb and rolled out with a revamped version of Taylor Woodrow Construction’s .NET based content management system.

Sean McAndrew, business systems analyst at Taylor Woodrow Construction, commented: “As a business, we are keen to use best-of-breed applications whenever possible and in the area of affordable enterprise search, the Google Search Appliance is largely unrivalled. Google has the added benefit of users familiarity with Google.com so the learning curve for implementation was really simple. Users noticed the benefits of the improved search immediately, and there was no requirement to develop and rollout an extensive training course as is usually needed with a new system.”

Now the entire UK operation has direct access to the search facility through the homepage of the corporate Intranet. Employees in Ghana can also use the search facility by accessing the UK Intranet site. The Google Search Appliance can search tens of thousands of documents held within TCMS and interrogates another 1,800 entries in Taylor Woodrow Construction’s corporate phonebook.

There has also been a 25 per cent reduction in calls to the support department, which used to occur when users couldn’t find the content they were looking for; previously the HR department was receiving around 20 calls a day. Now both the support departments and users are spending less time dealing with search enquiries. The Google Search Appliance also enables the company’s 1,800 employees to subscribe to certain types of information and receive notifications when new or revised documents are published helping employees stay better informed about company developments.

As well as using the Google Search Appliance to search content efficiently, the organisation is considering linking the enterprise version of the Google Desktop application with the Google Search Appliance. The new system will possibly be configured to include some of the organisation’s document management systems and, therefore, provide a single source for searching and accessing documents.

Robert Whiteside, UK sales manager for Google comments: “Taylor Woodrow Construction’s response to the Google Search Appliance is typical of many of our large enterprise customers. The Intranet acts as an important communication tool and central repository for information in a business. When it is used as heavily as it is by Taylor Woodrow Construction employees, and plays a crucial role in employees meeting internal processes and procedures for compliance regulations, companies can only benefit from having a competent search tool in place, especially one in which users respond well to the familiar search interface.”

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