Senior Business Developer
SKF is the world's largest bearing manufacturer, founded in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company manufactures and supplies bearings, seals, lubrication and lubrication systems, maintenance products, mechatronics products, power transmission products, condition monitoring systems and related services globally.
The SKF search solution allows employees within the global organisation to easily get access to all types of information regardless of location, as well as serving external customers and SKF third parties. The enterprise search platform serves as a single-point-of-access to information and via the use of APIs several consumers have their own customized applications which have either internal or external facing end users. Search functionality has been developed over time with the focus on true user requirements and business value.
The application has been operational since 2007 and has been a great success with SKF classifying it as business critical. In the organisational paradigm shift, in which SKF has turned from traditional industry company to a knowledge engineering company, the search application has been a key support for information retrieval for all employees, thereby increasing work efficiently and allowing capitalisation of the in-house corporate wisdom.
Today there are more than 250 000 search queries being requested every month.
Technologies used
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Findwise i3 - Turning your search engine into an insights engine. Read more about Findwise i3 here |
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Elastic (Elasticsearch) - A powerful component for modern search technology. |
How a search based solution can help both sales reps and customers
Customer support
The Vehicle Service Aftermarket team at SKF identified the need for end customers to easily access product data for replacement kits, such as: technical specifications, PDF bulletins, instruction videos and photos.
In order to make product data easily available replacement kits sold and delivered will have a printed QR-code on the package. The QR-code will hold a URL pointing to the web application, based on a product search technology.
Sales support
To simplify sales reps work situation and make it more efficient SKF decided to invest in a mobile application to be used as an offline sales tool. The motto for the project was “always be ready with an iPad” and the result is a portable product brochures archive in the palm of the hand.
SKF Shelf is a mobile application for iPhone, iPad and Android meant to be used by sales reps as an offline sales tool. The solutions is based on Findwise search based services.