Essilor and the Google Search Appliance

Essilor

Go Figure:
26,534: # of Essilor employees worldwide
290,000: # of product SKUs
550: # of researchers
1600: # of contact lenses Essilor sells every minute around the world
2000: # of employees currently accessing the Google Search Appliance
1000: average # of searches performed daily through the Google Search Appliance

“With Sharepoint we could easily create content but could not effectively find, share, or manage it. With the Google Search Appliance we can search across our entire knowledge base quickly and effectively…”

Julien Vielle,
Project Manager at Essilor

Business Essilor is the world leader in ophthalmic optical products. Essilor designs and manufactures corrective lenses, delivering products and services that enable eye care professionals around the world to offer personalized solutions that restore perfect vision. Its intense dedication to research and innovation empowers Essilor to sell over 195 million lenses a year to over 200,000 retail outlets worldwide. Essilor is headquartered in France and has operations in more than 100 countries.

Challenge As the leader in a complex, technology-driven industry, Essilor continually strives to leverage its size while at the same time retaining the speed and agility of a much smaller, more nimble organization. Providing every employee with easy access to information across the company is critical to Essilor maintaining its competitive advantage.

To manage information across the organization, Essilor initially implemented Microsoft Sharepoint at its French headquarters. Sharepoint enabled Essilor employees to easily create content and build their own collaborative websites. While creating content was easy, it was, however, extremely difficult for the users to find, retrieve, and share data. To begin with, searches were based on employee-assigned metatags and thus returned inconsistent and inefficient results. In addition, employees had difficulty leveraging information contained within Essilor's library of over 500,000 documents because Sharepoint lacked effective full-text search capabilities. For example, an employee looking for information about a particular product could find the website for that sales department but could not locate any documents pertaining to the product. According to Julien Vielle, Project Manager at Essilor, "employees were often reinventing the wheel with each new project because they were unable to leverage the collective learnings within the Essilor knowledge base." These shortcomings were compounded by the fact that Sharepoint made it extremely difficult for the company's IT department to centrally manage the information.

Solution Essilor needed a solution that would enable it to bring the power of the entire enterprise to every employee's fingertips quickly and easily. The company partnered with Google and licensed its industry leading Google Search Appliance. The Google Search Appliance crawls content and creates a master index of documents that's ready for instant retrieval using Google's search technology. Working with Google's Enterprise Support team, it took Essilor less than two weeks to implement the Google Search Appliance at its French headquarters. Now Essilor employees can:

  • Search thousands of Essilor's documents and all of its intranets to find, retrieve, and share human resource, legal, and sales and marketing information.
  • Leverage KeyMatches, implemented by Essilor, corresponding to frequently searched categories. For example, anyone wishing to access the legal department need only type in the word 'legal' to be directed to its intranet.
  • Utilize simple, intuitive search and results pages customized to Essilor's requirements.
  • Quickly access only the information that they have permission to view based on established security parameters

The Google Search Appliance requires minimal ongoing maintenance to deliver this functionality to Essilor's employees. The Appliance's simple and easy to use administration enables Essilor's IT department to centrally manage the company's search capabilities and quickly add functionality such as additional KeyMatches.

Results "The Google Search Appliance is wonderful--our employees are thrilled with its ease of use and the relevancy of its search results" said Julien Vielle. The 2000 employees currently accessing the Appliance run an average of 1000 searches a day, querying everything from sales and pipeline data to personal vacation policies. The Appliance will ultimately integrate with over 200,000 documents contained across Essilor's data repositories, providing employees with immediate access to all relevant corporate information.

Essilor sees the potential for the Google Search Appliance to increase productivity and knowledge-sharing throughout all areas of its business. The company plans to implement the Appliance across other functions and geographic locations, making all the information within the company's web servers, file servers, and content management systems instantly available from a single familiar search box. Integrating with Documentum to access Research and Development's data repository is one of the first priorities. "Everyone across the company can benefit from faster, more efficient access to the right information. We intend to have our entire global user base leveraging the Google Search Appliance, in multiple languages, to quickly search across the knowledge base of the entire organization and find what they need," proclaimed Julien Vielle.

Contact sales for more information.