Case Study: Essilor And The Google Search Appliance

Challenge
As the leader in a complex, technology-driven industry, Essilor continually strives to leverage its size while at the same time retaining the speed and agility of a much smaller, more nimble organization. Providing every employee with easy access to information across the company is critical to Essilor maintaining its competitive advantage.

To manage information across the organization, Essilor initially implemented Microsoft Sharepoint at its French headquarters. Sharepoint enabled Essilor employees to easily create content and build their own collaborative websites. While creating content was easy, it was, however, extremely difficult for the users to find, retrieve, and share data. To begin with, searches were based on employee-assigned metatags and thus returned inconsistent and inefficient results. In addition, employees had difficulty leveraging information contained within Essilor's library of over 500,000 documents because Sharepoint lacked effective full-text search capabilities. For example, an employee looking for information about a particular product could find the website for that sales department but could not locate any documents pertaining to the product. According to Julien Vielle, Project Manager at Essilor, "employees were often reinventing the wheel with each new project because they were unable to leverage the collective learnings within the Essilor knowledge base." These shortcomings were compounded by the fact that Sharepoint made it extremely difficult for the company's IT department to centrally manage the information.