INTRANETS: ‘Planet BP’ Content Management

With a limited budget and a small core staff, BP America leveraged technology to improve productivity and enabling a small national team to efficiently create, distribute and customize news and information through a variety of channels to reach its diverse base of 33,000 employees in multiple regions and business segments.

Content-driven intranet
A dynamic, database-driven content managed intranet enabled any number of front-end contributors and back-end administrator to easily schedule and manage news and information for the home page portal, news kiosk, calendar, employee classifieds and resource pages. The workflow process ensures that each posting is reviewed using custom-developed content management system (CMS) before it goes live, increasing website consistency.

Planet BP multi-regional home pages
BP America’s internal communications function focused on two guiding principles in developing its Electronic Communications strategy and program:

1. Improve efficiency and the productivity of its limited staff by creating content (news and information) once and then using it in many places (sites, regions) and media (intranet web site, email newsletter, lobby monitors).
2. Provide a flexible and easy-to-use standardized system that enables local communicators to decide how active they want to be in creating local content and/or distributing corporate news and information.

Click thumbnail below for more information:

Houston

Canada

Alaska

Chicago

CMS1

CMS2

e-Newsletter

Local News

TV Edition

Solution overview
BP America’s Electronic Communications plan includes the following key elements:

• The custom system serves as the backbone to BP America’s electronic communications program. It is now used to manage content on all regional intranet sites as well as to supply content to other electronic media, including email news round-ups and lobby plasma screens. This eliminated duplication and improved productivity by standardizing internal communications web sites across the company.
• Each of Planet BP’s regional web sites serves a dual purpose of providing relevant corporate news and information as well as region- or site-specific news and information and resources.
• Email “round-ups” e-newsletters feature the week’s top stories and enable readers to get a quick update in case missed a story on the intranet site. The functionality for quickly building e-mail newsletters (creating the HTML) is built into the Planet BP CMS. Newsletters can be constructed in 10 minutes.

Results
Since its first debut in 2002, the Planet BP national intranet has proven to be a tremendous success. Planet BP earned the IABC Bronze Quill Award Honor of Excellence in Communications in 2002 and again in 2005.

Planet BP continues to provide comprehensive, up-to-date news and information for many thousands of employees across North America daily, and continues to grow each year.

Credits

• Joe Massucci, BP US Strategic Communications Web Project Manager
• The Web Department, Web Development, custom coding