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Kimberly-Clark manages global enterprise search with minimal staff
Company Kimberly-Clark is a leading global health and hygiene company employing more than 55,000 people worldwide and posting sales of $18.3 billion in 2007. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with operations in 37 countries, Kimberly-Clark’s global brands are sold in more than 150 countries. Every day, 1.3 billion people trust Kimberly-Clark products. With well-known family and personal care brands such as Kleenex, Scott, Andrex, Huggies, Pull-Ups, Kotex, Poise, and Depend, Kimberly-Clark holds the number one or number two market share position globally in more than 80 countries. Approach With a workforce that needs ready access to information and documents of all kinds, Kimberly-Clark relys heavily on enterprise search solutions. “Just in the United States alone, our users search through about 22 million documents every day on our intranet and associated corporate file servers,” says Director of Enterprise Business Intelligence, Renée Nocker. Despite the high-volume requirements of the organization, the previous search solution fell short. It was incapable of searching corporate file servers – it could only search the primary intranet site as well as a half- dozen external sites. And capacity was a major issue. All in all, the previous solution was only searching about 500,000 documents. “Users were complaining that they could not find what they were looking for, so many of them simply gave up and stopped using our search functionality. Accuracy and usability were poor, and we couldn’t add more content to the catalog because the tool couldn’t handle any additional capacity,” says Project and Technical Lead, Sean Powell. “It also took days to generate a full index – and the indexing process didn’t always work.” Powell and his team began looking for a more robust search alternative – one that could be quickly and easily deployed and managed, all at a reasonable cost. “Our web team is continually shrinking, so whatever we deployed had to be cost-effective and practically run itself,” says Manager of Collaboration and Content Management Dorothy Stephenson. “But our number one consideration was capacity – we needed to search tens of millions of documents.” Ultimately, the strength of the Google brand led the team to choose Google Search Appliance for both internal and external search. “Our users had a bad taste in their mouths when it came to search,” recalls Stephenson. “But the familiar, intuitive functionality and positive brand recognition of Google brought people on board immediately.” Results Powell notes that Google Search Appliance is capable of searching a wide array of repositories. It is used to search about half a million static web pages on the company intranet, as well as web applications, homegrown document management systems, web file servers, corporate file servers, and the company’s public internet site. It is also scalable on an ongoing basis. All Powell has to do is call Google to add more capacity. “Google Search Appliance grows effortlessly as our content grows,” says Powell. Internally, there was no need to convince anyone, and literally no training required. Today, searching through the company’s huge body of documents is fast and seamless. Powell says users comment positively on search performance and the relevance of results returned. Perhaps best of all, Google Search Appliance offers a lower total cost of ownership because it doesn’t require any servers to be deployed – something that wasn’t the case with other solutions the company considered. “We have the same .2 full-time employee supporting search as we did before, but we’ve gone from searching at best 500,000 documents to searching 22 million documents,” says Powell. “I’d call that minimal administration.” With years of successful use of Google Search Appliance behind it, Kimberly-Clark now plans to deploy the GB-7007, the new single-box appliance from Google with the capacity to store up to 10 million documents; a threefold-plus improvement over the 3 million documents supported in the GB-1001. Additionally, Kimberly-Clark is excited about obtaining the latest Google Search Appliance features, which include personalized results, alerts, enhanced security through support for Kerberos, metadata biasing, and advanced reporting. Looking to the future, Powell looks forward to deploying the GB-7007 throughout the Kimberly-Clark organization. “We are excited about the fact that the GB-7007 has the capacity to store up to 10 million documents in a single box,” says Powell. “The new architecture also provides fast performance – a plus because crawl rates are a big deal for us.” A major advantage of the GB-7007 will be the ability to extend Google search solutions to other geographies outside North America with a low-cost, server-free and easily-maintained solution. “With its ease of management, simple licensing structure and multiple language support, we can easily deploy the GB-7007 to our other geographies without a lot of additional overhead,” says Nocker. “The GB-7007 is a great way for us to deploy search worldwide and have it readily grow along with our organizational content.” About the Google Search Appliance The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies, the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications, and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. Contact sales for more information. |
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