Google Enterprise

Emerson Process Management and the Google Search Appliance

Go Figure:

$4.9 billion: Annual revenue of Emerson Process Management
85: # of different countries in which Emerson sales executives work
1250: # of employees initially given access to the Google Search Appliance
1450: average # of searches performed daily on the Google Search Appliance
586: # of KeyMatches Emerson has implemented with the Google Search Appliance

“You quickly understand the value when you can type a few words and immediately find the information you need instead of calling three or four people…”

Jim Cahill,
Blogger and Marketing Communications Manager at Emerson’s Process Systems and Solutions Division

Business Emerson Process Management is a leading global supplier of products, services, and solutions that measure, analyze, control, automate, and improve process-related operations. Companies involved in continuous and batch process manufacturing--including chemical, oil and gas, pulp and paper, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, power, water and wastewater--need to continuously improve their plants and processes in order to remain competitive. Emerson Process Management delivers consulting, engineering, and optimization services that enable companies to run efficient, profit-maximizing plants. Emerson Process, a subsidiary of Emerson Electric, is a $4.9 billion organization with more than 3500 employees across 85 countries.

Challenge Emerson develops process management solutions for companies with complex manufacturing processes. As a solutions provider for these capital intensive process manufacturers, Emerson works closely through the project cycle from early design through commissioning and ongoing process optimization. Emerson and its business partner sales executives need marketing information, sales collateral, reference, pricing and competitive analysis to effectively sell and manage accounts. Components for these solutions span many Emerson Process Management divisions which add to the complexity.

With such proliferation of information, Emerson found itself with hundreds of thousands of documents, in multiple languages, on web servers scattered throughout the divisions—the marketing server for the DeltaV product alone contained over 60,000 documents. The problem was not in creating the content, rather it was in finding, retrieving, and sharing the information across the organization. Emerson initially utilized Microsoft's Index Server to search its data repositories, but it offered limited full-text search capabilities within a single server. Unable to effectively access the organization's written knowledge, busy sales executives often resorted to making several phone calls to get business critical information. Furthermore, Emerson's inability to utilize its documentation to provide easily accessible product and pricing information to customer accounts caused additional inefficiencies. Customers voiced concern over the difficulty of looking through online documentation, and they often used valuable sales executive time getting answers to questions buried within the company's documentation. Emerson needed a solution that would empower employees, business partners, and customers to easily search the company's data repositories and quickly find answers to their questions.

Solution Emerson's Process Systems and Solutions (PSS) division selected the Google Search Appliance for its intranet based on the Appliance's superior functionality and easy implementation and maintenance. The fact that most employees already used Google.com for web search also offered a familiarity that would facilitate rapid adoption throughout the organization. The PSS Marketing department successfully launched the Appliance on a Friday afternoon and created an initial list of 48 servers for the Google Search Appliance to crawl. The user search box was added to the server for their DeltaV automation system intranet server that afternoon. Over the next few weeks the Appliance was added to 20 other servers as other divisions integrated it with their sales and marketing intranet servers.

While minimal customization was needed to deploy the Appliance, Emerson added functionality to further increase the Appliance's impact on the organization. Emerson created over 500 KeyMatches corresponding to key products or frequently asked questions. With KeyMatch an employee enters a product name and is immediately directed to up to date pricing information, product guides, customer references, and sales presentations. KeyMatches have also enabled Emerson determine which information an employee receives about a product, service, or solution is of the highest priority and rank documents accordingly.

Implementing the Google Search Appliance gave Emerson the opportunity to significantly extend the reach of its 'content experts' within the organization. According to Jim Cahill, Emerson's lead blogger (www.EmersonProcessXperts.com) and Marketing Communications Manager at the PSS division, "We have experts all over the company, and the more we can empower them to share their knowledge, the better off we will be." To begin with, content created by these experts is more efficiently and effectively shared throughout division. In addition, these experts can direct employees to content by suggesting additional KeyMatches for their areas of expertise or product lines. Furthermore, search results prioritize the most current content. Highlighting outdated content allows employees to focus on the most updated information while simultaneously encouraging content experts to update content.

Recognizing the value to its customer base, Emerson Process Management implemented the Google Search Appliance on its public site as well. The Appliance was expanded out to all Emersonprocess.com sites in different language versions. Each country's search and results pages were quickly customized to meet individual market needs. Now Emerson's prospective and installed base of customers can utilize the Appliance to quickly and easily find information such as up to date information. This has increased usability and satisfaction while at the same time enabling Emerson account managers to focus time on more strategic customer issues.

Results Adoption of the Google Search Appliance was immediate and overwhelmingly enthusiastic. "It now takes our sales executives 15 seconds to find something they used to burn 30 minutes looking for…" proclaimed Cahill. "Many of them have told us that this is the best thing we have ever done for them. We are extremely pleased with the results relevancy of the Google Search Appliance."

In addition to dramatically increasing employee efficiency and enabling content experts to easily share information across the organization, the Google Search Appliance is providing Emerson with valuable insight into their employees and website visitors. Utilizing the Appliance's reporting capabilities, Emerson generates monthly reports on frequently searched terms. These terms are then reviewed and considered for new KeyMatches. The company also leverages the information to better understand trends in their customers' questions, concerns, and interests.

Over time, Emerson plans to implement the Google Search Appliance across other divisions. There are over 30 divisions today with a proliferation of information that needs to be managed and organized for competitive advantage. There are also internal blogs across the organization that Emerson has integrated with the Google Search Appliance in order to harness valuable information contained within them. Emerson is also looking to maximize the still untapped benefits of the Appliance. According to Cahill, "The Google Search Appliance is flexible enough that if we tell it where to go, it can help people find what they need much faster. We are still getting smarter about how best to leverage the Google Search Appliance."

Contact sales for more information.