About

Headquartered in Blomberg, Germany, Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG is the world’s industry leader in electronic interface and industrial automation technologies. Since the company’s founding in 1923, Phoenix Contact has grown their product offering into a wide selection of industrial electronics, including modern components and system solutions.  Today, Phoenix Contact employs a global staff of 5,300 and operates 33 subsidiaries worldwide.

Challenge

Increasingly, international firms struggle with the task of creating content in multiple languages that is accurate and consistent across its Web pages.  As a global entity, Phoenix Contact’s marketing team faced the daunting task of redesigning its site with a unified corporate brand and image that was consistent across all language variants.

Prior to the site relaunch, each country autonomously created and managed its own content and design.  Consequently, Phoenix Contact experienced a lack of brand continuity across its different country sites, both in corporate design and the use of terminology for their product descriptions and methods.

The lack of coordination in the creation of content resulted in unnecessary extra work and long delays in posting content. "Sometimes five corporate sites would create five separate descriptions of the same product," remembers Peter Roski, responsible for New Media in the Phoenix Contact marketing team. "This meant unnecessary extra work for us, creating additional costs.  It was also a source of error."

Phoenix Contact needed a Web content management solution that would:

• Centralize the design and product language for all 30 country Web sites
• Provide easy customisation and localization of content for subsidiary sites
• Seamlessly integrate with existing TRADOS Term Management system
• Cut the cost and time required to update and translate existing content

Solution

For its corporate redesign, Phoenix Contact’s objective was to create one site that contained all product and corporate information.  This master version would then be published to more than 30 Web sites in 19 different languages, including Chinese, Hungarian, Korean and Russian. Phoenix Contact began looking for a content management system (CMS) that could fulfil their requirements for a multilingual, international project on such a large scale.  After evaluating 15 different content management offerings, Phoenix Contact chose the RedDot Content Management Server (CMS).

RedDot CMS enables Phoenix Content to easily manage an unlimited number of language variants for their company site. RedDot CMS’ Unicode-based User interface allows Phoenix Contact to display languages in any character set within the RedDot CMS environment, which is essential to working with content in languages that use double-byte characters such as Chinese or Korean. "Another major advantage of RedDot CMS is that it makes it easy for authors to create and maintain content", explains Peter Roski.  “Our Web editors find it very easy to use the system, because they can control all processes via the RedDot user interface. With only a few mouse clicks, they can select languages and trigger the translation workflow. Everything else runs automatically.”

Results

By the end of next year, over 30 Phoenix Contact Web sites worldwide will be managed using RedDot CMS. With centralised management and improved workflows, maintenance and administration costs have been drastically reduced. In the past, it often took several weeks for information about new products to be included on all Phoenix Contact Web sites; now it takes only a matter of a few days on the sites implemented in RedDot. Peter Roski confirms that workflows have been simplified for both authors and translation service providers: "The cost of creating product information for our Web site has been cut by approximately 80 percent,” says Roski.

Phoenix Contact now has:

• Unified corporate design across their worldwide sites
• Centralized product information
• Consistent terminology in print media and across the Web sites
• Simplified and accelerated translation workflow
• Time and cost savings of up to 80 percent for maintaining country Web sites
• New product information is immediately available online, greatly improving customer satisfaction

Facts and Figures

Customer: Phoenix Contact GmbH & Co. KG

URL: www.phoenixcontact.de and 30 additional Web sites

Project duration: 6 months

Greatest challenge: Integrating the TRADOS translation memory system into the translation workflow

Editorial and database servers:  RedDot CMS, operating system Windows 2000 Advance Server English SP3 (IIS), Hardware: PC server using 2 x Intel Pentium IV, 2,4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 2 x 36 GB HDD, Raid 1 Live server: operating system Windows 2000 Server English SP3 (pure), Oracle 8.1.7.0, Hardware: PC server using 2 x Intel Pentium IV, 2.8 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 2 x 36 GB HDD, Raid 1 and 4 x 72 GB Raid 1+0