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Overview
Taylor Woodrow Construction, a subsidiary of Taylor Wimpey plc, Taylor Woodrow Construction is a leading provider of construction, facilities management and consultancy services throughout the UK and for key customers in selected markets in Europe and also in Ghana. The business is focused on selected growth areas - repeat services for 'blue chip' customers, facilities management (FM), Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) and engineering, capitalising on its Technology Centre facility.

Challenge
Tayweb is the name of Taylor Woodrow Construction's corporate intranet, an important tool for Taylor Woodrow's employees if the 6,708,000 page views received in the first quarter of 2006 alone are any indication of usage.

Despite the importance of Tayweb to the company's operations, employees did not always find it easy to locate the information they needed. So as usage of the tool increased, Taylor Woodrow decided to improve the functionality of Tayweb to meet this growing demand.

The improvements formed part of a project called 'Tayweb Personalisation'. "The overarching aim of the project was to make it easier for employees to access relevant business information using Tayweb," explains Sean McAndrew, Business Systems Analyst at Taylor Woodrow Construction. "The project emerged from a belief - formed from a combination of personal experience and general feedback - that employees could not find the business information they required on Tayweb."

The existing search facility was unable to search documents or Web pages not specifically held within the Tayweb content management system (TCMS). "The old search was also fairly rudimentary in its approach and did not employ any contextual aspects for filtering, and presentation of results," adds McAndrew. As the way Tayweb has been configured is more conducive to search than navigation, it was important that the search experience was improved to help users retrieve the right documents rather than have to try navigating the site.

Taylor Woodrow wanted to improve accessibility to all information, but particularly so for process and procedural information, as an inability to retrieve this information was making it difficult for employees to achieve the required level of consistency across the organisation. The developer was worried that an inability to find documents was not only creating a barrier to process compliance, but might also be hiding more deep-seated reasons for non-compliance.

Solution
Consequently, Taylor Woodrow looked for a tool that would improve the search functionality in Tayweb. McAndrew and his team investigated offerings from some of our other technology providers, but found Google's Search Appliance more than met its requirements. "As a business, we are keen to use best-of-breed applications whenever possible," he adds, "and in the area of affordable enterprise search, the Google Search Appliance appeared to be largely unrivalled."

The developer was particularly attracted to the dynamic page summaries and highlighted query terms that the Google Search Appliance offers. "In our previous system, a user had to click and open a document to find out whether it was actually the document he or she was looking for. As many of our documents are held as PDFs, this operation often took a second or two, whereas the page summary and highlighted query terms undoubtedly saves our employees time," explains McAndrew.

The automatic spellchecker, 'Did you mean' (synonyms) suggestions and customisable keymatch feature has become a key feature for employees as it further increased the chance of a user finding the document they were searching for first time.

"Training employees on how to use the system was not a significant issue", recalls McAndrew. "Most people use Google for searching the Internet, so the learning curve for implementing a new system based on something so familiar was far less. Our people noticed the benefits of the improved search immediately, and there was no requirement to develop and rollout an extensive training course as people."

Results
McAndrew expects the improved search results, which are now listed by relevancy, will save employees time in searching for the document they need, as they won't have to make as many searches. There has also been a 25 per cent reduction in calls to the support department, which used to occur when users couldn't find the content they were looking for. Previously, McAndrew estimates the HR department was receiving 20 calls a day, each lasting five minutes. Now both the support departments and users are spending less time dealing with search enquiries.

"Through the new search facility, users within the business are reaching more documents that they previously may not have been aware existed," adds McAndrew. The knock-on effect of this 'cross fertilisation' of content has been a review of Taylor Woodrow's published documentation. "The feedback facility built into our CMS has provided an effective way of making authors aware of documents that may require updating or improving," he notes.

There are further intangible benefits from employees using the improved search results to research answers to questions they might otherwise have asked someone else. For example, users can try to address any IT problems by locating and using the self-help IT system guide rather than contacting the IT department straightaway.

Future Plans
As well as using Google Search Appliance to enable the whole company to search for content efficiently, the organisation is considering linking the enterprise version of the Google Desktop application with Google Search Appliance. The new system will possibly be configured to include some of the organisation's document management systems and, therefore, provide a single source for searching and accessing documents.

About the Google Search Appliance
The Google Search Appliance is an integrated corporate search solution that extends Google's award-winning search technology to intranets and websites. The Google Search Appliance is available in three models: the GB-1001 for departments and mid-sized companies; the GB-5005 for dedicated, high-priority search services such as customer-facing websites and company-wide intranet applications; and the GB-8008 for centralized deployments supporting global business units. For more information, visit http://www.google.co.uk/enterprise/.