Project Title: Global Employee Portal to Integrate 100,000 Employees Worldwide

The Challenge

One of the world’s largest FMCG companies with 100,000+ employees worldwide, operating in 200+ countries, and having nearly 3,000 products in their portfolio.

• A complex business and technology landscape:
  • Multiple internal organizations that all require that their information needs be met simultaneously
    
  • Different parts of the organization depend on different content sets from different systems
• A sophisticated technical architecture:
  • SAP portal and comprehensive SAP infrastructure
    
  • Multiple SAP based applications implemented and in use
    
  • Stellent (now Oracle UCM) content management system providing large content base
    
  • Integration with additional applications including Lotus and MS SharePoint
• Complex administration and security requirements:
  • 50+ user roles that require personalized access
    
  • A centralized User Management structure
• Aggressive delivery schedule:
  • Initial commitments to business and employee stakeholders to deliver advanced features and functions
    
  • An aggressive stated timeframe
• Distributed development processes and lifecycles
  • Had to accommodate the highly iterative and primarily ‘face-to-face’ nature of the work being done within the Customer
    
  • Communications processes required updates to align with client structure

The Solution

The Customer decided to create a global employee portal to consolidate all major HR and Corporate Communication functions into a single, personalized interface. This portal required functionality and scalability from the existing SAP platform that was at the cutting edge of these types of implementations.

Having served SAP for more than a decade as a product development outsourcing partner, EPAM was uniquely positioned for this project. Having both the ‘down-to-the-code’ level of expertise in the SAP platform as well as extensive expertise in portal development, EPAM was selected by the Customer as a primary technology partner to implement this solution.

The global employee portal was designed to provide a host of powerful features:  

• Up-to-date personalized content and access to key employee applications
  
• About 1,800 dynamic pages: each page containing several content items managed in Stellent CMS
  
• Deployment on a cluster of 10 logical nodes on 3 IBM AIX Servers
  
• Geographical distribution of servers for redundancy
  
• A clean, efficient and intuitive UI supporting the goals of the Customer

Technologies and Tools

• IBM AIX, MS Windows
  
• SAP Enterprise Portal, SAP KM, MS SharePoint Services, Lotus Domino Server, Autonomy IDOL, Stellent (Oracle) CMS
  
• Java, .Net, C++, LotusScript
  
• Oracle 10i, MS SQL Server 2003
  
• Java EJB, JSP, Servlets, SAP KM API, XML, SOAP
  
• Lotus C API, Lotus Script

The Results

The portal went live on time and on budget, with over 11,000 global users visiting the site on the first day. The global user scale capability is up to 100,000 end users, with 10,000 simultaneous visitors, while maintaining a typical response time of less than 5 seconds. The Portal has been launched in almost 100 countries around the globe with the following benefits:

• Time savings that translate to over USD 5 million in annual cost savings for the Customer
  
• Collaboration and information sharing with colleagues has reduced the need for travel and improved efficiencies.
  
• While lowering costs, the "HR Self-Service Model" provided by this portal also increased employee satisfaction and retention.

In addition to the original development and implementation, the portal is supported by the EPAM team which continues to maintain the system.

Started as a typical development project, the overall success and collaborative nature of the engagement enabled the outsourcing relationship to evolve into a broader partnership between EPAM and the client. As proof, EPAM was voted the ¹1 Outsourcing Vendor for the Customer.

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