Boehringer Ingelheim - Personalising intranets to support every employee to do their job
Global pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim had the largest intranet in SWOOP Analytics’ 2025 global benchmarking study of SharePoint intranets. It’s also one of the most engaged intranets in the world.
Despite having more than 30,000 intranet pages, people are visiting the pages and finding the information and news they’re after.
The key to such a large yet successful intranet?
Boehringer Ingelheim makes every employee feel valued by personalising content and targeting audiences to make intranet news and content relevant to every individual person.
It’s all about providing people with the tools, apps, content and news they need to accomplish their job and have a successful day.
Stefan Thormann, Corporate Brand Touchpoints Manager, Boehringer Ingelheim.
This personalisation, and making people feel valued, starts every day when employees log into their computer. Boehringer Ingelheim’s intranet is the default home page for internet browsers.
At the start of the day, everyone receives a personal greeting to set a positive tone.
With such a personalised intranet, when people land on the home page, there’s every chance they’re going to see something that piques their interest, and they often click on the article, tool or app to learn more.
Stefan Thormann, Corporate Brand Touchpoints Manager at Boehringer Ingelheim, said relevancy is key to a successful intranet. Relevancy has been the focus of the dedicated cross functional team Stefan works in.
“Our vision for the intranet is thinking about what people need, on a daily basis, to accomplish their job,” he said.
“This is the place where you start your day, and you find everything you need to have a successful day and accomplish your work.
“We’re always asking and listening – what is it people need? What information? What tools? The intranet is like an entry door to our news and content and also applications and tool catalogue.”
Ultimately, that’s the purpose of the intranet at Boehringer Ingelheim - to make every person’s day successful and help them accomplish their work.
A screenshot of Stefan’s personal intranet home page. News is personalised to him, along with links to training, tasks, tools, and the all-important canteen menu.
“This is the global home page, with a personal greeting,” Stefan explains.
“It has a mix of corporate news and Germany news (because of my location). On the right side, is our new dashboard.
“Most cards are personalised. These are my trainings I need to do. ‘My Tools & Apps’ is a selection of my favourite ones, ‘Assigned Tasks’ is from my Microsoft Planner tasks, ‘Approvals’ come from different sources, ‘Lunch Plan’ can be selected to the one that I like to see.”
How to personalise your intranet
Personalising content to each employee has been a collaborative effort between Boehringer Ingelheim’s Corporate Affairs and IT departments. Working with Microsoft’s Active Directory, Boehringer Ingelheim has been able to personalise content by region, country, department and more.
“We make it as easy as possible to find to give people their relevant content,” Stefan said.
A screenshot of the second section of Stefan’s personalised intranet home page.
Scrolling down the home page, Stefan will find more personalised news, clearly marked as Corporate News, Local News and Functional News, all based on his assigned business or functional unit.
Below this is Stefan’s personalised Viva Engage feed to join conversations that may be beneficial to him based on his role, location and department.
A screenshot of the final section of Stefan’s personalised intranet home page.
The final part of the intranet home page focuses on local news based on Stefan’s location, along with events he may want to join, and a Help section.
“We are trying to provide as much relevant and valuable information and access to our employees as possible,” Stefan said.
“We know this is the most important channel to reach our employees. So you find the top stories there but also other news which is tailored or targeted to each person.
“We have a list that people can customise called ‘My Tools & Apps’. This is also why people often visit the home page, to use it to find the tools and apps they need in order to book travel or book time away or whatever they need to do on a daily or weekly basis.”
Moving past the intranet home page
A screenshot of the Boehringer Ingelheim canteen menu on the intranet.
As mentioned earlier, Boehringer Ingelheim was in the top three for the most engaged intranets in SWOOP Analytics’ 2025 benchmarking study of almost 160,000 intranets pages across 28 organisations. This means people are moving past the home page, and navigating to content or news pages that interest them.
Stefan credits this impressive result to the fact that the intranet home page is personalised to make it appealing to each individual.
“The home page is an entry door, this is important and this is why we have so many visits on a daily or weekly basis,” he said.
“People definitely visit pages beyond the home page and what we try to do is we try to catch their attention on the home page with the news.”
Boehringer Ingelheim also had the highest number of net readers for the intranet in SWOOP Analytics’ study, which coincides with it being the largest intranet.
Another factor, Stefan said, in attracting people to move past the home page is making pages short on text, straight to the point and easy to read. This is a response to a staff survey which found people felt the relevancy of information on the intranet, and especially in news articles, wasn’t high.
“People said; ‘It’s not as relevant to me at all. If I’m working in the Animal Health department, I don’t care too much about any news coming out of Human Pharma or IT’, so now we’re trying to implement this more targeted approach,” Stefan said.
A screenshot of Stefan’s Tools & Apps.
The other finding was there was too much news, and it was too long.
Stefan said it can be a challenge to limit news articles and word count when many different people and departments want to be seen and heard.
“Trying to tell them to keep it short and keep it simple and don’t post too many isn’t that easy,” Stefan said.
“But we are getting there.”
Another popular inclusion on the intranet is the personalised canteen menu, as each Boehringer building has its own canteen for employees. This is also helpful for anyone travelling to another site if they want to know what’s available on the menu.
Perhaps the most used section on the intranet is the link to Tools & Apps. Everyone can select what they want on this list and directly access it from the home page. To start the working day, people log onto their computer and the browser defaults to the intranet home page, where they can then click on the Tools & Apps card to go directly to the sites they need to work.
“People come to the intranet because they find what they need to accomplish their work,” Stefan said.
