Rödl & Partner streamlines its processes and knowledge-sharing through Omnia
The international auditing and consulting firm Rödl & Partner has implemented a new intranet and Process Management System based on Omnia. The new platform helps the company keep all business-critical processes and information, such as guidelines and policies, up-to-date and correct. It also supports Rödl & Partner in boosting internal communication, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration, as well as bringing its worldwide operations closer together. In addition, it provides better accessibility to both local and group-wide information.
“With Omnia, we have built a modern, scalable, multilingual, decentralized, group-wide, and future-oriented communication platform. It helps us strengthen our knowledge-sharing and internal communication, both globally and locally. The new solution has also strengthened control over and simplified the handling of our business processes and governing information”, says Edin Visnjic, Senior Manager of Rödl & Partner’s Center of Excellence Intelligent Automation, and adds:
“The management of and access to our business-critical templates, policies, guidelines, and other information crucial to our work has been significantly improved. Our employees can now find all information quickly and easily, and with full confidence in its reliability. Content owners can also be confident that every page, template, and document they are responsible for is up-to-date and accurate. All thanks to Omnia’s clever publishing and governing tools.”
In search of a modern and scalable global solution
Headquartered in Nürnberg, Germany, Rödl & Partner helps German businesses all over the world with auditing and other consulting services. Its workforce of 5,800 lawyers, tax advisors, management and IT consultants, and accountants is spread across 110 offices in 50 countries.
Rödl & Partner’s previous intranet was outdated and lacked key functions needed for planned improvements. Among other things, the company wanted to improve the intranet’s findability properties to simplify and speed up the search of information. They also wanted a more advanced process and content lifecycle management, multilingual support, and unlimited scalability for continued expansion.
“Over the past decade, we have grown rapidly and massively across the globe. Our old intranet was mainly used only in Germany, and it was difficult to modernize and scale up. Consequently, there was an urgent need to upgrade our platform so that we can improve internal communication, both locally and across our worldwide organization. However, our main focus throughout this project has been to create a state-of-the-art process and content management solution”, Edin underlines.
Seamlessly combining global and local communication
After a thorough market analysis, Rödl & Partner chose Omnia as the new intranet and process management platform. According to Edin, Omnia’s high scalability and broad set of out-of-the-box functions, including its comprehensive multilingual and content management functionality, were decisive factors.
“Omnia’s administrative and governing features, powerful support for multilingual sites, and its built-in content approval process functionality, were some of the things that stood out against the competition. We saw that we could easily create a user-centric, decentralized, multi-layer intranet that seamlessly combines group-wide and local communication”, Edin explains.
The development and implementation of Omnia started in March 2023 and the new intranet was launched in the same year. In this first rollout, the group-wide global site is available to all employees, but so far only the German local site has been integrated. Rödl & Partner’s ambition is to gradually include all local sites, in each country's language.
“One of the benefits of the new solution is its decentralized governing structure. Local site owners and editors can easily create and publish local pages, without having to involve the group's IT department. It’s literally just a click on a button on the home page. We have also integrated the DeepL translator app in Omnia, which automatically translates any content into the language of the local site”, Franciska Lurz, Business Process Manager, points out.
“In the past, publishing new content was usually handled centrally by our IT department. In more than 50 content workshops with our service lines and units, we have jointly structured the content required for the go-live in Germany in advance and created a problem-solving navigation structure”, Franciska continues.
Automatic process and content management enhances reliability
Edin and his team have tried to build in as much automation as possible in the publishing and workflow processes to eliminate manual work and increase the quality of information. The most important are the approval, revision, and archiving processes.
“In our line of work, it’s very important to stay up to date with regulatory changes, standards, and industry practices. Furthermore, Rödl & Partner has its own set of standards that our employees must follow in their profession. Therefore, we have prioritized the creation of automatic workflows around the management of our processes and governing information in building the new solution. For instance, our Multistep Approval Flow ensures that nothing gets published until it’s verified and approved by the right decision maker. Our revision and archiving workflows protect all content from getting old and inaccurate”, Edin notes.
The revision and archiving workflows are as simple as they are ingenious. The content owner is automatically reminded 40 days before the revision date expires. If he or she fails to revise the content in time, the page is automatically archived and the content of the page is made inaccessible to anyone except the owner and approver.
“It’s a self-regulating system as no one wants to be responsible for critical information not being available to one's colleagues. The owner is also repeatedly reminded via email and notifications. These automated workflow processes save us a lot of time, reduce manual errors, and ensure high quality and reliability of all information being published on our intranet”, Edin concludes.
A unifying platform
Unlike many other auditing and consulting firms, which are built as partner networks, Rödl & Partner addresses the market as ONE company, formed as an international group. With a common communication and knowledge-sharing platform it will be easier for Rödl & Partner to distribute and share group-wide guidelines, core values, news, and business-critical information. According to Edin, this will strengthen organizational cohesion and the company’s international brand:
“We think it’s very important for the respective subsidiaries and units to have their own local intranet in their local language, sharing local and country-specific news and information. Equally important is giving all employees access to our group-wide communication, best practices, and shared values. It will strengthen our brand and increase engagement, collaboration, and knowledge-sharing across our worldwide organization. With Omnia, we can combine local considerations with our global vision in a seamless and efficient manner.”
