B. Braun Knowledge Center (BKC)

A social intranet for more than 50,000 employees that breaks down information and communication silos and bridges long distances for collaboration.

Who is B. Braun?

B. Braun Melsungen AG is a pharmaceutical and medical supplier with more than 50,000 employees. With the motto “Sharing Expertise”, they aim to improve therapies and workflows in clinics and practices and to increase the safety of patients, doctors and nursing staff. In 2014, the company celebrated its 175th anniversary as one of the world’s leading healthcare providers. B. Braun Melsungen AG continues to be owned by the founding family and is now active in 64 countries.

What were the requirements?

Development of an intranet solution based on Confluence: Away from an editorial system and towards an open “collaboration system”, in line with the company motto “Sharing Expertise”.

Multiple languages, a location-specific navigation, as well as location-specific content were among the key requirements for the international corporation.

The B. Braun Knowledge Center (BKC) is a social intranet platform based on Atlassian’s Confluence social collaboration system. The BKC is a comfortable, flexible and intuitive knowledge and collaboration center as well as an expert network within the organization promoting international collaboration.

What does the solution look like?

Custom design: The BKC is equipped with a custom Confluence theme matching the company’s corporate design to give the employees a familiar look and feel to the application. Numerous usability and functional improvements have been made to the Confluence standard interface to make it easier for users to use the BKC in their daily work.

Global navigation: Our Linchpin Navigation Menu app supports freely configurable global navigation menus for different user groups and group locations, including multi-language support. Each employee is shown the navigation menu that is most relevant to them.

Network of experts: The Linchpin User Profile app extends the BKC with a company-wide expert search, allowing useful contacts to be quickly identified matching specific specialist area with a single search query.

Personal cockpit/dashboard: Custom information feeds are available to the user on their personal BKC homepage, where relevant news can be published and consumed in a targeted manner. Each day when a user logs in, they receive all current relevant news automatically. They can also subscribe to their own customized news channels.

Custom app store: Users can access all internal and external applications important to their daily work via the BKC dashboard with just one click. They can customize the applications that are displayed.

Protection from simultaneous editing: The //SEIBERT/MEDIA Edit Lock app notifies any user trying to edit a document that is currently being edited by another user. This helps minimize conflicts in editing and lost entries, as well as the frustration that comes along with it.

Integration of enterprise search: The BKC search function not only allows searching within the intranet, but it also finds content in external systems (“Google within the business”)

Mobile version: The BKC has a custom mobile theme and is optimized from mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, etc). Users have access to page content, in-app notifications, their personalized news and activity streams, favorites, the search function and their personal network of colleagues.