Turning data into insights

"The average worker spends almost two hours a day searching for information in a wide variety of formats and types across a wide variety of sources," says Peter Simon, Team Head Web & Digital Solutions at Sika. "This then needs to be turned into actionable information to make decisions based on. " The specialty chemicals company, headquartered in Baar/CH, has over 18,000 employees, a global presence with subsidiaries in 101 countries and production in over 200 factories.

All Sika subsidiaries operate more or less independently in terms of IT. This is exactly where the crux of finding information used to lie: There was no central overview of where which data sources were used. The number of employees has risen from 2,000 to over 18,000 in the last 40 years. Their networking and communication with each other became increasingly difficult in a decentralized corporate organization. In 50 percent of the cases, employees did not find what they were looking for right away.

Categorize found knowledge in a meaningful way

A central search engine was needed. Analogous to Google, it was to gather information from structured as well as unstructured data (i.e. text documents of all kinds, emails, social media blogs, videos, call center recordings...), and this across all data sources in which they are available: in publicly accessible sources such as trade databases, scientific publications and patents, on internal and cloud-based collaboration platforms. Equipped with AI and machine learning algorithms, the knowledge found should be meaningfully categorized and made available to the user in real time.

A lot of intelligence and computing power that such a system must combine under its hood. The software solution chosen for this purpose was Sinequa, which DTI integrated into the digital workplace at Sika. DTI took on the entire spectrum of project tasks - analysis, detailed specification, project management and implementation, documentation creation, training, introduction - and is also responsible for operational support with defined response times. "We adapted Sinequa's standard user interface to the customer's needs, carried out integration and tests on the IBM Connections Cloud connector developed by Sinequa, and tapped additional data sources," explains Bert Frei, Chief Customer Officer at DTI. IBM's Connections collaboration solution is the basis of the digital workplace, which is the gateway for Sika employees' daily work. As a combined collaboration solution for e-mail, online meetings, instant messaging, file sharing and joint document editing, Connections was introduced back in 2015, and has been operated entirely in the cloud since the end of 2017.

All important data sources are indexed

Since February 2018, employees have found a small search field in this digital workplace: "Sika Search". Behind it is the search software that has indexed all the data from the various sources in the company in order to be able to perform searches and analyses in it. The index results in a data reservoir from which relevant information can be compiled within seconds. Two hours of search time per day have thus been reduced to a fraction at Sika. One of the indexed data sources is "Sika World", the social intranet. There, static, edited content with underlying workflow (e.g. HR policies, official announcements, etc.) is combined with employee-created social content from "SikaConnect" - this data source includes internal blogs and communities. The search and analysis software also accesses Sika Web, the company website. All international Sika websites are indexed there and made available to employees for research. The company database is also searched, including all employee names, responsibilities and skills, certificates, organizational charts, etc.

Information in the right place at the right time

So if you are looking for a specific term at Sika, you enter it in the search field and can then set numerous filters in a menu: Search for specific sources, formats, language and much more. The software then provides the inquirer with the results from the connected data sources. The categorization via the business-relevant filters helps to immediately recognize the results that are decisive for the user among all those displayed by the search engine as relevant. Sika describes the resulting benefit as follows: Employees become fully productive in less time because knowledge is found and shared faster. They get better insights from data because the right information is delivered to the right person at the right time.

During 2019, new sources were added, such as videos, blogs, and security and user experience were improved again. More sources are in the pipeline, including digital asset management. In parallel to the ongoing operation, DTI is constantly being tasked with optimizations and contributes to the fact that the percentage of those who do not find what they are looking for at Sika continues to shrink.