terranets bw GmbH, headquartered in Stuttgart, is the transport network operator for gas in Baden-Württemberg, which ensures non-discriminatory transport with its approximately 2000 kilometre long transmission network. The company also offers an equally comprehensive telecommunications and communications network. Currently, more than two thirds of all towns and municipalities in Baden-Württemberg as well as parts of Switzerland, Vorarlberg and the Principality of Liechtenstein are connected to this network. Customers include network operators, public utilities and industrial companies.

On the company’s own knowledge platform terrapedia, corporate guidelines and organisational manuals of the various management systems have been available in a transparent and clearly arranged form for each of the approximately 250 employees since 2013. “The status, validity or responsibility can be displayed for all documents, thus creating the basis for systematically checking or updating them as required”.

“Anyone can edit directly and the latest version is immediately available to everyone throughout the company – after prior review by the responsible specialist editor”, explains Menges. The same applies to the corporate guidelines available in the BlueSpice MediaWiki. Using the powerful search function, everything can be found easily at any time. “The time saving is enormous. Other platforms are much more complex.

Terranets bw operates various management systems according to ISO standards. Among others, an information security management system according to ISO/IEC 27001 and an HSSE management system according to ISO/IEC standards 14001 and 50001 as well as BS OHSAS 18001 for health protection, occupational safety and environmental protection. Within the framework of external monitoring by the various certification bodies, the BlueSpice Media Wiki terrapedia has also proven its worth, because the necessary rules including the associated forms are generally accessible and the traceability of changes due to the revision has more than convinced the auditors.

Picture: Screenshot of the terrapedia wiki

“It was particularly challenging,” Menges said, “to familiarize users with the wiki mentality. The knowledge platform terrapedia is filled by different users, every employee can edit contributions – this is a big difference to the previous organisation. And the editor also works differently from MS Word.

In order to familiarise users with terrapedia, user training courses were held at terranets bw at the start of the new knowledge platform in cooperation with Hallo Welt GmbH! “You’ll never really be finished.”

Currently terranets bw is updating to BlueSpice3. Menges also expects a great added value from an increased use of the Semantic Wiki, e.g. for the internal control system. “In the past, it used to be necessary to create elaborate Excel tables for this purpose, but now the workflow can be traced at any time using the individual signatures without the need for an external application”. There’s still some potential in there. But already in the first five years after its introduction it became clear: “The use of the knowledge platform is much more efficient for the employees of terranets bw due to the transparency, the overview and the traceability of the processing”. (sa)