Rieter Group Global Manufacturing

Operating in 10 countries, the Rieter Group employs more than 5000 employees across its 16 manufacturing plants. Since 2006, the company has managed its images, brochures, investor materials, presentations and videos using Picturepark, which it has integrated into IBM Domino and the Typo3 CMS.

After being in business for more than 100 years, Switzerland’s Rieter Group faced a challenge familiar to other organizations its size and age: The company’s media data was scattered across the workstations of company employees throughout the firm. There was no global search of all content, and there was no one person who knew where everything was.

The search for a given image was a time-consuming exercise that could yield no results. Worse, images that were found could be erroneously used because there were no controls in place. And the proliferation of duplicate and outdated files was making things even worse.

2016 marks the Rieter Group’s 10th anniversary using Picturepark

Needs Assessment and Choice

Rieter decided that the best way to overcome its digital chaos was to adopt a digital asset management system. The company’s DAM system requirements were straightforward and clear:

  • Content had to be accessible to all employees across all facilities, without hassle or inconvenience.
  • Content had to be delivered in the format most appropriate for the requesting user’s intended use.
  • Content should be clearly tagged for easy retrieval so that it can be found and re-used, instead of recreated or relicensed.
  • The system had to be browser-based so that client software wouldn’t have to be installed and later upgraded on all workstations.
  • The system had to be Cloud-based DAM so that its IT team wouldn’t have yet another system to manage and support.

After a comprehensive evaluation of a number of systems, Rieter chose Picturepark for its ease of use and the unique functionality it provided.

Successful Launch

In February, 2006, the Rieter Picturepark was launched. Though the system has grown in size and value in the years since, it provided the company virtually immediate value. All marketing assets were finally available from a single location. Company policy could determine who had access to what, and how things should and should not be used. Employees were able to connect from more than 40 local and remote locations to get what they needed, 24/7, without having to involve IT or anyone else.

“Thanks to Picturepark, search time for particular assets has decreased substantially and marketing staff is relieved from performing picture searches for others,” explained Riter Marketing Project Manager, Nicole Balhuber.

Rieter chose to organize its content according to business groups. This is a common choice for larger organizations whose content can easily be categorized across institutional boundaries.

What’s important to note is that organization-based content management doesn’t preclude an employee from one department from access content owned by another department. Access to content is determined by user permissions. Picturepark users can share content with anyone they choose, so Rieter was able to offer its employees a controlled, organized system that wouldn’t get in the way of their workflows.

Integration into LDAP and CMS

To make user management easier and more secure, Rieter launched Picturepark with an integration to the company’s IBM Domino® system. Domino was already in place as the company’s central user management system (LDAP), so it made sense to take advantage of that functionality, rather than create and manage new accounts for 5000+ employees. (Picturepark also supports Active Directory, which is used for account management at many other enterprises.)

In 2008, Rieter launched a new website based on the Typo3 Web content management system. They took the opportunity to integrate Typo3 with Picturepark so that website editors could access corporate-wide repositories in use across the company. Typo3 editors can search, browse and place Picturepark-managed digital assets right from within Typo3. Assets can be embedded into website pages or linked for always-current downloads.

About Rieter

Rieter (SWX:RIEN) is a global industrial group based in Winterthur, Switzerland. Formed in 1795, the company is a leading supplier of spinning machinery and technology components. Rieter has a presence in 10 countries with 16 manufacturing facilities.

Autoneum (SWX:AUTN), the former Automotive Systems division of Rieter, was spun off as an independent company in 2011. The company purchased its own Picturepark license at that time and has been an active customer since.