Continental - enterprise content management for international automotive components supplier

The customer

Continental AG is one of the world's major automotive components suppliers. The core competences in the area of tire and brake technology are enhanced by the comprehensive know-how of vehicle dynamics control. This enables Continental to serve as a system partner to the automotive industry worldwide. At Continental around 80,000 employees work at 106 locations in 27 countries.

The challenge

The former Continental AG internet solution was strongly oriented on company structure and less so on the needs of the visitors to the site. The aim of the relaunch was therefore to standardize all of the Continental divisions in the internet and at the same time provide various target groups with fast access to information as required. To achieve this it was necessary to integrate distribution new channels: today every tenth tire at Continental is already ordered electronically by the specialist store; original equipment manufactures are also using Internet information channels with increasing frequency. The project "master plan" created in 1999 aimed at consolidating the Internet activities of Continental AG. At the beginning of 2000 the style guide and the structure of an innovative Conti-online portal was adopted. The new Conti-Online-World, which was launched in April 2000, was realized piece by piece by IBM e-business Innovation Centers in close collaboration with ICA Informationssysteme Consulting- und Anwendungs- Gesellschaft GmbH, a joint subsidiary of IBM and Continental. ICA was responsible for the technical conception, implementation and quality assurance of the portal controlled via an iPlanet Enterprise Server. At the end of 2000 the previous static internet solution was migrated to a Web content management system and continually developed. In February 2001 the URL structure was extended using a brand concept with the aim of introducing cost savings by replacing the decentralized hosting. A rollout in the European markets was also planned. w//Center Consulting GmbH supported the European-wide rollout of the Conti-Online portal covering the project planning and implementation as well as the quality assurance.

The solution

Continental AG chose to implement the CoreMedia CMS following a comprehensive evaluation phase. The CoreMedia CMS is the leading system in the area of cross-media publishing and is principally implemented as a high performance content management system for extremely large sites, portals and multimedia services on the market. Innovative and market-leading companies such as T-Online International and O2 use CoreMedia systems enterprise-wide. The CoreMedia CMS covers all areas of the enterprise-wide content value creation process: content production, content management, content delivery, content syndication and e-commerce. The dispersed, highly scalable CoreMedia Generator Framework for the personalized generation of various formats with integrated caching is geared towards high-end sites with heavy loads implementing innovative technology. High performance cross-media applications are realized using JSP and XSL templates. The system's broad range of functions is incorporated in a look and feel design to provide the user with an easy to use Editor and HTML Editor. Using a file system view (SMB Gateway) it is possible to process images and graphics directly in external programmes without having to use copy and paste. The multimedia data is updated directly in the content base (database). Tables as well as image documents are easy to include using the table editor and can be edited internally within the system. Using an Oracle interMedia Gateway a full text search can be carried out in all of the documents located in the database. XML/XSL importer framework and XML export modules ensure simple imports and exports. In addition to NITF, XML, SGML/HTML and Flash, PDFs can be generated flexibly via XSL transformations. Sophisticated personalization enables the integration of Autonomy and Bea WebLogic.

The basic framework was defined quickly and w//Center started work in spring 2002 following a comprehensive briefing by Continental. The briefing covered the planning and conception of the European markets roll-out, i. e. extending country portals in France, Spain, Sweden etc as well as extending country-specific brand sites such as Uniroyal, Barum, Semperit based on the existing layout templates. w//Center used its own CoreMedia development environment, which was based on the CMS infrastructure at Continental to exclude any technical incompatibilities from the outset. Due to the high number of sites needing to be produced and the demanding time plan, a large number of production processes were carried out partially automated using the CoreMedia Script API. This requires a precise production process concept which leads to fewer errors while maintaining the same production speed, employing minimal resource levels and therefore lowing costs. Modern project management and controlling tools guarantee transparent project execution and contribute to overall customer satisfaction thanks to a high level of production quality. A close and successful collaboration between Continental and the various e-business service partners played a major role in the project's success.

The success of the project to-date confirms that the implementation of the central content management platform is an important pillar of Continental Internet communication. The standard corporate identity for the standardized Conti Internet solution answers the needs of a virtual market place as well as the specialist requirements of individual company sectors. By using the CoreMedia CMS central infrastructure, layout templates etc, w//Center realized a state-of-the-art Internet solution for the Continental AG market organisations quickly and cost-effectively. The new infrastructure also provides Continental AG with an internationally standardized Internet solution. The procedures developed during the project planning phase ensured that maximum synergy was achieved for the roll-out of the Internet solution in the European markets and that the by far means negligible initial investment related to the master plan project more than paid off.