Bunge: 13 regional intranets became one portal, each region in its own language

Bunge works in agribusiness, food ingredients, fuel and fertilizer, with a presence in more than 40 countries. To keep their autonomy, with their own brand needs, categories, applications and technologies, its regions ran 13 different employee intranets.

In the first workshops, in November 2015, employees told us what that felt like. “Switching back and forth between portals is a hassle.” “If you go there you don’t see the content you need.” Search did not work, not even for policies, which lived in Lotus Notes, and people opened the portal only because it was their browser’s home page. Language was a worry, and so were the plants: Bunge wanted it kept simple for people in the plants, including workers without a computer.

For the people publishing, it meant many content libraries, no standard content pieces, and a portal that was “very difficult to publish” to. Bunge wanted one global portal without taking away what each region needed to say to its own people.

Starting with the people who would run it

The work began with stakeholder workshops in St. Louis and White Plains in November 2015. We led the redesign from there, coordinating a global team that defined the requirements for each region, and designed one information architecture, a common taxonomy, authoring templates, global components and a governance and change-management plan, on IBM WebSphere Portal 8.5 and our Portal Blueprint.

Your language first, English as the fallback

The portal serves each person content in their browser’s language, with English when a translation does not exist, and regional authors publish in their own language. What people see is personalized from their directory attributes, so the global site, their region and their country share one home page. Employees got search across the company’s content, commenting, a policies directory, daily headlines from many sources in one format, a video gallery that plays every source the same way, and later their own quick links and an on-page translation into other languages.

Region by region, in 4 releases

After the global platform and North America, Brazil became the first non-English site (from January 2017), the Southern Cone brought Spanish with Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay (from June 2017), and Europe, the Middle East and Asia followed (October 2017 to June 2018), reusing the analysis and design of the earlier releases. In 2018 we reorganized the portal around regions, with regional views and author roles.

Local authors who own their content

Each release included a content inventory, clean-up and migration with the business groups. Training for authors and site administrators was repeated in each region, on site and online, in English, Spanish and Portuguese, alongside adoption campaigns.

Bunge’s 13 intranets became one global portal, with one information architecture and governance model, where each region publishes in its own language. More than 150 content authors were trained, in Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Geneva, Germany, Mexico and the USA. The portal took 2nd place among 20 projects nominated worldwide in Bunge’s annual company-wide innovation awards.

We have stayed on since: new capabilities such as a global policies site and directory, years of support, and in 2024–2026 the upgrade of BungeConnect from IBM WebSphere Portal 8.5 to HCL Digital Experience 9.5, which we still support in 2026.