Founded in 1902, the Manitowoc Company has grown into an industry leader in the foodservice equipment, shipping dock crane and marine products sectors.

Manitowoc’s brands of lattice-boom and tower cranes are the best recognized in the shipping industry, while its broad line of commercial food service products such as ice making machines and walk-in refrigerator/freezers are the known worldwide.

Within its marine division Manitowoc operates more than 60% of the dry docks serving the Great Lakes. Its shipbuilding and repair facilities are the best equipped of any U.S. Great Lakes shipyard.

Challenges

Consistent Brand Image

Because of its dissimilar product lines, Manitowoc wanted a consistent brand image across all of its business groups. Each business unit has a focus on new product development with specific goals: expanding the global market share in the crane group, growing foodservice through new product introductions and improved operations and decreasing backlog in the marine division while reducing the infrastructure costs across the company. Additionally growth through acquisition has brought the requirement to have the ability to transition expanding new product documentation and web content into the Manitowoc brand quickly and efficiently. Controlling the wide range of product information produced for web sites and printed materials represented a formidable challenge.

The common thread running through all business units was a focus on web content. This included product information on Manitowoc’s public web sites, service information available to customers and partners, project document collaboration and efficient internal communications with employees.

Product Documentation Requirements

Manitowoc has a diverse business model with a broad array of offerings. Most of their commercial products are in operation for an extended period and require service and support by a scattered set of partners. Maintaining the design and service documentation for each model over time is an important goal. Providing accurate service documentation to the distributed partner network amplifies the issues. Manitowoc enables access to this set of documentation through a combination of public and private web sites. Improving the efficiency and accuracy of the documentation revision cycles was critical.

Secure Project Collaboration

In addition to the commercial product documentation, the marine group has several large contracts that require a secure extranet to allow document sharing with external access. The initial approach was to leverage an existing web hosting facility and an internally developed application to provide a document posting and access point. Keeping this site up to date was time-consuming and error-prone. Customer response time was adversely impacted whenever large CAD models were accessed.

Employee Intranet Document Sharing

A company intranet was also hosted within the same web-hosting site. This system provided a means for every Manitowoc employee to post documents into a secure site for sharing among teams, projects, departments, or ad-hoc groups. Human Resources also used this system as a central site for company documents that were stored and made accessible to Manitowoc employees at work or offsite.

Solution

Manitowoc saw an opportunity to replace their existing web site hosting arrangement with an enterprise web content management system that could provide web publishing functionality and secure document management capability in a single platform. After an extensive selection process, the solution selected for Manitowoc’s Web Content Management initiative was Documentum.

BRT Inc. partnered with Manitowoc’s web services partner Skyline Technologies for integration and consulting services to migrate 18 public web sites from Manitowoc’s crane, food services and marine groups, as well as Manitowoc’s employee network, and customer extranet operations. Additional development requirements included the ability for single web login from the web sites into a secure docbase and the ability for users to edit their own security profiles when importing documents into the intranet.

Controlled and Automated Web Publishing

The first step was to migrate the existing web content into a Documentum docbase. Through the ability of Documentum to automate content publishing based on lifecycle states, Manitowoc gained the ability to preview their web content on a work-in-process and staging server. This provided the ability to preview all new content prior to the automatic update of the production web sites.

The next phase of the project will extend the web site content authoring and approval process by adding workflow for content approval and dynamic lifecycle state promotion. An effort has begun to migrate web site content into XML source based on predefined templates. This will allow personnel within distributed functions without web content expertise to author product content, while enforcing marketing brand standards for presentation automatically.

Documentation Updates

In addition to publishing web site content, the product documentation is also available online. Adding revision control to the publishing process for service documentation allows authors to make changes to the source documents and have them published to the site when a new revision is promoted to the approved state. Manitowoc is also moving ahead with new efforts to provide enhanced product service information to its partners through extranets created with a secure web site, along with a dynamically linked secure document repository that can be controlled with document level security within Documentum.

Customer Extranets

Manitowoc has also deployed several customized extranets that publish a secure web site for project information, all having links into the docbase for secure documentation. This feature is easily extendible to new contracts and can be leveraged as a capability in new project bids.

Employee Intranet

Migration of the company’s intranet has already provided many benefits. The employee intranet web site has been rebuilt and branded as “the connection” with dynamic links available to take users into the secure docbase, either at the overall cabinet view for flexibility or to any specific folder or document. This allows the HR team to provide direct links to critical HR documents and internal company notices.

Faster response time for user access improves employee use of documents. Having the ability to customize the security of documents at import allows users to have complete control over who can see or edit their posted documents. Using revision control features improves team or department collaboration over the alternative of using shared network drives.

Summary

Manitowoc needed a system that could handle web publishing and enterprise web content management for the entire company. They also needed a platform that could grow with their needs for future business initiatives and one it could integrate into current and future technology plans. Documentum Enterprise Content Management was able to meet all of these requirements and provide a stable and high performance platform for content management.

Immediate improvements have been realized in the efficiency of employee access to company documents through the new system. Time and cost reductions are very evident in the extranets used for customer contract document management as well.

The ability to control the web publishing process through lifecycle states allows marketing to preview and approve content before it’s moved to production sites. Extending this capability through templates and workflows will result in even more powerful and efficient processes.

BRT provides solution consulting, project management and implementation services designed to provide an efficient and easy-to-use web-based content management system. Call BRT at 248-324-9775 and see what we can do for your organization.