Case Study: Emerson Electric achieves sub-2-second search and 99% faster index rebuilds with Elastic

Emerson - Customer Case Study

Emerson Process Management, a global division of Emerson Electric with ~35,000 employees and extensive WebCenter Content deployments (tens of millions of documents), struggled with very slow metadata searching (up to ~45 seconds across the database, 12–15 seconds for 1M records) and index rebuilds that took months. The performance problems caused dissatisfied users, high ticket volumes and constrained administration, yet the team needed a fix that required no UI, security group or database architecture changes.

Redstone Content Solutions integrated Distributed Elasticsearch (elastic) with Oracle WebCenter Content to intercept searches and run them against DES indices, preserving the existing user experience. The result: searches across all content now complete in under 2 seconds (1M records in <1s) and a full 17M‑record rebuild went from ~3 months to 9 hours, delivering ~99% performance gains, a reported 950% ROI and about $2.1M in annual time-savings—users are ecstatic.

Emerson Electric

Mark Heindselman

Director Knowledge Network and Information Services