1. Westaflex
Company Background
Westaflex is a large global HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) owned by
Westaflex Holding and based in Gütersloh, Germany. Founded in in 1933 by Lorenz and
Ferdinand Westerbarkey, who developed a coil-based tube forming machine, the first sta-
ble and any-shape tube of its kind. During the 1960s, expanded into other international
markets and is now present in 32 countries on five continents with a strong focus on Eu-
rope and North America. Westaflex products are used in a variety of applications includ-
ing automotive production, train technology (ICE ventilation), for the air supply and ven-
tilation of living spaces, exhaust technology and water treatment. Westaflex has 2700 em-
ployees worldwide with around 250 at their headquarters in Gütersloh.
Westaflex places a great deal of emphasis on the quality of its products and the role of em-
ployee participation, engagement and communication in achieving this quality. Twin
brothers Jan and Dr Peter Westerbarkey jointly own and run Westaflex and put a lot of ef-
fort into establishing a productive, innovative and open corporate culture. Westaflex's cor-
porate motto is "connections which pay"; something which applies not only to their prod-
ucts but also to the value they place on the connections they have with their customers
and with each other.
Corporate culture is key
Jan Westerbarkey explains that when he and his brother took over the management of
Westaflex, the prevailing attitude towards workers was that they were there to work and
not talk. Westerbarkey relates a story of watching an office worker talking to a telephone
operator on the day of the interview saying that it is precisely this sort of informal commu-
nication that he and his brother wanted to establish at Westaflex: one where open dialogue
was prized as being critical to the success of the company. They believe that everyone
needs to have a sense for the work of the company as a whole. For example, the people
working the machines in the factory need this to understand what the ramifications of a
mistake in the production process are.
Westerbarkey also believes that this openness needs to extend outside the firm walls to the
company's customers and the wider world. He describes how is Grandfather would keep
close contact with journalists that might write about the company in order to try and influ-
ence their message for the better. Nowadays, customers can talk to each about the compa-
ny, its products and prices in open public forums; everything is transparent. Westerbarkey
believes that the only way to deal with this is to engage in open dialogue with their cus-
tomers and the public in the same way that they do internally.
This change in culture is a gradual process rather than a one-off initiative. It takes a lot of
time and will probably never be finished. Moreover, not everyone is happy about these
kind of changes. About eight years ago Westaflex introduced an initiative allowing people
to have their own person profile page sitting underneath the company's homepage. Mid-
dle management objected heavily citing risks that headhunters would be able to contact
employees directly. But in the end those fears proved to be unfounded. Instead, there was
very positive feedback from prospective and existing clients and partners saying that they
were now able to put a face to a name and had direct access to the people they needed to
talk to.

2. Background to Enterprise 2.0 Efforts
Westaflex began their experiments to find a technology to support their open communica-
tion culture in 2006 using OpenGroupware. However, after a bad experience with a failed
database update they decided they needed another approach. Westerbarkey also believes
that the top-down nature of the OpenGroupware project was another reason why it was
not so successful: potential users were not personally invested in its success. Westaflex be-
gan looking for a new product. An employee suggested that they just start building some-
thing, with the aim of developing a solution that could support communication along the
production process, that would allow people to share informal notes and have them on
one information platform and to reveal information about the status of a client or a project
to, for example, sales colleagues in other countries.
Creating a New Platform
At the time, there were very few suitable products on the market but some contacts they
had at the Universität Bielefeld recommended that Westaflex try using Plone: an open
source content management system. They advised against using wikis as they thought
them too rigid; instead they advised Westaflex to build a system based around documents
with rich metadata - a more semantic approach. Westaflex went down this route, integrat-
ing the system with DB2, in order to allow the project to aggregate all the company's infor-
mation.
They made sure to involve the company's employees in the development of this new plat-
form. They had open discussions and workshops using techniques such as metaplan to get
employees to contribute ideas for how the platform could work, features that they would
like to see and tools that would be particularly useful for them. Employee engagement
only increased when with every new iteration of the design employees could see their
ideas being realised. They wanted to make sure, in line with their open culture, that this
was not a management project imposed from above and that everyone was engaged in
making it better. In designing the platform they drew on interface elements that everyone
was familiar with: a prominent google-like full-text search and easy browsing of docu-
ments in an Windows explorer-like way. Because users were so involved in creating the
platform and they taken steps to insure its usability, they have not given any formal train-
ing in its use or written a manual.
Westapedia also includes Westatwitt - an internal micro-blogging application which is
used by employees to exchange short messages about projects, about what they are work-
ing on and more informal communications. It is also possible to invite other users to a
workspace using an @-sign and follow the progress of a project or an initiative using a #
(hashtag). Any message that includes the latter is automatically pulled into the project
space and archived. That way, people joining the project later have the possibility to fol-
low previous conversations and get up to speed much quicker. An interesting fact to high-
light for Westapedia components is the interchangeability of data. Any message from
Westatwitt can be easily transferred into a user's todo list or calendar for example, so a
message mentioning a delivery can be added to a calendar to remind the individual to do
something about it. Similar to Twitter, the system is kept fairly simple by design in order
to allow interaction via phone. A totally different approach though was taken towards
read acknowledgements. Whenever a users sends out a tweet on Westatwitt and someone
else reads it, the author is notified. The idea originated in email lists, where the author of

3. an email can be notified whenever some read the message. Just like with email, this option
can be turned off though.
In homage to Wikipedia the new system was called Westapedia which is, however, mis-
leading, as it is much more than an encyclopedia. It integrates collaborative document
editing, team calendars, todo lists, chats, microblogging and data flows from enterprise
systems. It provides users with a personal dashboard, where they can find all the informa-
tion relevant to them. A user can use his personal dashboard to keep track of documents,
organise his time and maintain personal to-do lists. Westapedia also has private spaces
where employees can talk about non work-related issues.
Outcomes and Conclusions
Westerbarkey tells us that all employees are using the system for a variety of purposes and
that adoption was never an issue because of the way they involved users from the very
start. The most common and fundamental usage is for project work. A top-level hierarchi-
cal framework exists within Westapedia but within this users are free to create their own
groups. Creators of groups are asked to keep groups open to other Westaflex, so that the
entire company can benefit from it. Only a few groups are private.
Documents are the basis of the system and there are now over 400,000 on Westapedia.
These documents can have arbitrary metadata assigned to them so, for example, docu-
ments can have a reminder date that is used to send the creator a reminder to update it or
documents can become events by giving them a start date and an end date. All documents
can be commented on, tagged and bookmarked.
Westapedia's support of manufacturing projects has been extremely successful. The com-
bination of all documentation being available to everyone and the flexibility of the com-
munication tools around a project allow people to keep a clear awareness of what is hap-
pening. This has had a couple of concomitant benefits:
•All projects have a backup manager so that when the person in charge is away, the project
can continue. With Westapedia, almost anyone on the project can act as a backup manager
because they all have access to the relevant information.
•The incidence of costly production mistakes has been reduced. When managing client
product samples, there is potential for making costly mistakes in moving to a full produc-
tion run before a client has fully agreed to it. The project awareness that Westapedia has
enabled has helped reduce this sort of mistake.
As well as supporting project work, they also have internal groups and communities to fa-
cilitate the internal communication and the sharing of ideas. Westerbarkey says that this is
particularly useful for helping employees learn new techniques and approaches, particu-
larly when combined with video tutorials which have proved particularly popular with
younger employees.
The success of the platform has now turned outwards. Westapedia are using it not only to
manage their internal communication and collaboration, but also their company website.
They no longer have an individual responsible for maintaining the website. Instead, it is
everyone's responsibility.
Westerbarkey says that this new platform has changed the basis of communication within
the firm. Instead of proactive, push communications characterised by internal memos and
management dictats, the onus is now on every individual to stay informed about what is

4. happening. All the information they need is available on the platform or through their col-
leagues. Internal email has reduced by as much as 80% and they are aiming to completely
stop internal emails within the next year.
In Westerbarkey's own words Westapedia is now a self-organising system that gives
Westaflex enormous flexibility and helps them perfectly meet the needs of their clients.