Digital Transformation: Move Fast, Get Technology Out of Your Way

Tim Howes

December 16, 2019

Your CMS should empower your content team to work without learning new processes or involving IT

Enough was enough. Rubbermaid Commercial Products’ (RCP) Marketing team was done fighting its Content Management System (CMS) in their attempts to add, manage and distribute thousands of SKUs across hundreds of distribution partners, each with different requirements. The daily battle managing its CMS and product data – critical to sustaining business growth – meant products were not coming to market as quickly as needed, adversely impacting the bottom line.

Like RCP, many enterprises in the midst of Digital Transformation find technology, including their CMS, holds them back instead of pushing them forward. CMS technology should empower Content Managers to do their work without learning new processes or involving IT, and function as part of business processes and applications. Yet, few actually do.

According to a survey by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) in 2018, more than 62 percent of respondents found difficulties sharing information with colleagues, customers, suppliers, and partners. The biggest hurdle, according to 79.3 percent, was the lack of integration between their organization’s CMS and core business applications. These challenges underscore the importance in integrating content solutions with enterprise business processes.

Rubbermaid Commercial Ends the Fight with Its CMS

Done with its CMS battle, RCP embarked on its search for a new solution. Having reviewed its existing systems and business requirements, the team concluded the new CMS needed to:

Streamline product and site data management
Speed up time-to-market for new products
Provide an enterprise-level CMS powerful and scalable enough for their needs
Make the digital ecosystem flow more efficiently
Ready their website for eCommerce and be prepared to do the same for brand partners

Research led them to The Scylla Group, and after analyzing their situation, the team recommended Umbraco, an open-source and fully featured CMS based on the Microsoft .Net platform. To streamline workflows and reduce system complexity, The Scylla Group also suggested using Salsify to manage RCP’s Product Information Management (PIM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), and Content Delivery Network (CDN) in one unified system.

Tackling the corporate website CMS, the team first developed an intuitive page-building platform in Umbraco, using Salsify data, which enabled them to quickly build, populate and publish thousands of pages of product and corporate content. This efficiency led to a faster content review and an extremely streamlined integration process. The open architecture and extensibility enabled the team to easily integrate several third-party applications, including live chat, product recommendations, eCommerce, where to buy, and site search.

The RCP website now offers consumers a modern user experience (UX) with outstanding performance and a refreshed look and feel. Consumers can now easily browse and quickly purchase from RCP’s 6,400 online SKUs. RCP also has sped up product launches, now that their Marketing team is free from fighting a gridlocked and unscalable CMS. What used to take the team over a month to update now takes less than 30 minutes. Additionally, Sales, Customer Support, and their Distributor partners have an approved, consistent single source of truth for all product data, documentation and specifications.

Since RCP took control of its content, Google Analytics shows the new website has resulted in a:

23% increase in users
21% increase in overall sessions
16% increase in new users
55% increase in pageviews
27% increase in pages per session
20% decrease in bounce rates

As RCP discovered, Digital Transformation doesn’t need to be disruptive. There are CMS solutions that empower enterprises to focus on storytelling by allowing Marketing to take control over content management, rather than let it hold them back. It definitely helps if the CMS can integrate with a company’s existing infrastructure, as Umbraco did at RCP. Even better, the technology should enable an easy, more intuitive way to manage content on an integrated and streamlined website while building the back office to complement internal processes instead of adapting current practices to accommodate the software. These capabilities can significantly reduce IT involvement, ultimately resulting in substantial business benefits as companies reach their audiences faster and more effectively.

The Four Stages of Digital Transformation

To meet the maturing needs of your customers, you first need to understand which stage of Digital Transformation your organization currently exists, and what impact that stage has in enabling you to respond to your customers’ needs:

Stage 1: Digitally active. This stage represents early-stage or newer companies that have invested in technologies capable of handling transactions to increase revenue.
Stage 2: Digitally engaged. Most companies believe they are digitally engaged, but really are not. This stage is all about leveraging technology to reinforce your existing processes. In this stage, your solutions and processes work together in a seamless way.
Stage 3: Digitally competitive. Organizations in this stage are able to forecast future needs and respond to gaps. This level of maturity focuses on how technology is used, not what product they are using. An example of an enterprise in this stage is Walmart.
Stage 4: Digital maturity. Companies in this stage have a digital-first mentality and invest in developing their own digital innovations. Amazon is a prime example of this stage.