Beiersdorf AG
Founded in 1880, Beiersdorf AG has become an internationally leading brand company in the area of skin and beauty care. Internationally leading brands such as NIVEA, Eucerin, and La Prairie, an experience of more than 125 years in research and development and global presence characterize the company. Beiersdorf employs approximately 18,000 employees in more than 150 affiliate companies all over the world.
Task Setting
The consumer product market turns quickly. Customers and their needs change, and so do competitors, retailers, and products. A large number of employees are involved into keeping real-time track of said market developments by collecting and processing the corresponding information. The resulting data volume consisting of news, studies, product announcements, or advertisements are hardly comprehensible for the relevant decision-makers.
Solution
We have developed a multi-stage solution; Stage One being the integration of the variety of information into one tool: MBase. Thus, different content can be found at one place using the same method every time. Next to the classic display, Stage Two offers a consciously designed redundant display of contents, i.e. one and the same information can be found using a multitude of methods. One example: a TV spot presenting a deodorant produced by a competitor will not only be displayed in the most recent entries but also in the information referring to that competitor and in the list of TV spots. Finally, Stage Three provides a weekly newsletter filtering any input straight to the point to deliver tailor-made information for any user. Hence, information has now being delivered by the system instead of having to be manually collected by the user. As a result, the number of active MBase users increased from approximately 100 in the year 2004 to more than 2,000 persons all over the world in August 2008.
Technologies Employed
MSSQL Server 2000 / 2005, ASP.net, C#, AJAX, XML, XSLT