International Nutrition Company
An Open Source CMS
for managing 40 websites
located worldwide
International Nutrition Company
Project essence
- increase in the speed of feature delivery
- 10X faster time-to-market of new websites
- 10X decrease in the number of bugs
- In 77% of cases the security scan is passed on the first try
- $8 million annually cost savings on hosting in case of moving of all corporation branches
Learn more
About our collaboration with FMCG company
Project duration
May 2019 - ongoing
Budget
$500,000 – $1,500,000
Team composition
Project manager
Business analyst
Quality assurance specialist
4 backend developers
3 frontend developers
Technologies Used
Project background
Client
Our client was a branch of one of the world's largest food companies.
Client's business goals
The managers understood that a robust digital transformation was imperative to their business. So, they set the following business goals:
Optimization of business processes,
Increasing the company's productivity,
Improving customer experience.
The ultimate goal of the project
The client was specific about the goals they wanted to accomplish:
- Automation of internal business processes,
- Improving the quality of corporate websites: attractiveness, likeability, informativeness,
- Simplifying internal and external communication,
- Maximum coverage of the target audience in local markets,
- Effective promotion in new markets.
Reasons for using Open Source
To develop the required features, the company chose Open Source technologies. A prerequisite for project development was the use of Drupal.
Top 5 reasons why our client chose Open Source:
- The company won’t be tied to large vendors.
- Corrupt practices aren’t a concern in the slightest.
- Cost-effective development of truly useful features: no bloated budgets or overruns.
- The absence of license fees reduces the cost of support by 90%.
- Full ownership and control of all the artifacts.
Why did the company decide to outsource?
The corporation has its own software development department, but hiring a specialist would cost about $400 per hour. It was a bit expensive for a separate corporate brand. Besides, the available budget did not allow the company to carry out full-scale digitalization at the expense of internal resources. Outsourcing the project to us resulted in notable cost savings.
Also, it appeared extremely difficult to implement the same digital strategy in each local market. Alternatively, they could recruit marketing agencies to personalize the content and make the necessary alterations to dozens of websites around the world. But then again, this is quite time-consuming.
Hence, the best solution was to hire a vendor with the necessary technical skills to assist with the websites for all local markets.
Client’s requirements for the contractor
Hiring an agency that just specialized in Drupal did not make sense for the company as they needed a much wider range of services:
- high-quality technical consultation,
- digital strategy development,
- UI/UX design services.
How Attico got involved in the project
Our company was on the list of the corporation's external contractors. We were invited to participate in the project as we specialize in Drupal and offer a full range of consulting services.
Challenges of FMCG brand websites
No 1. Security Scan
While working on the project, we faced several challenges. The first challenge was the client's ideal development timeline, which was accelerated considering the need for robust corporate security scans. It was necessary for our team to fully understand the corporate culture and learn how to pass the security checks with minimum changes.
No 2. GDPR
One of the most stringent project requirements was to stay compliant with GDPR. The corporation adopted uniform rules to comply with GDPR requirements from a legal and technical point of view. We had to operate following the generally accepted corporate standards and bear responsibility for adhering to them.
No 3. User-friendly CRM
Another challenge was related to the fact that new websites in local markets are managed by business users. As a rule, the regional office staff do not include a technical specialist. Therefore, our team needed to design an intuitive product that is easy to use and understand, regardless of the user's technical skills.
References
I highly recommend Attico as a development partner. The company values its clients a lot.
I had the pleasure of working with the Attico team in 2019 on website development. The project was built on Drupal and involved the integration of third-party platform functionality.
The Attico team has high communication standards and aimed to deliver results to meet the client’s needs. They are also quite flexible in scheduling meetings and communicating with third-party partners to improve implementation quality and speed.
If I have a similar project in the future, I would consider working with Attico again.
SHOW FULL CASE-STUDY
Maria Dezhurko
Senior PR Manager
Wargaming, Belarus
We were happy to have Attico as our development partner. From the commencement of the project, the incremental delivery of the website was swift and way before the respective deadlines. We enjoyed the ability to communicate directly with the development team bypassing the bureaucracy which led to faster adoption of changes and bug fixing.
I would highly recommend Attico as a team of highly skilled Drupal professionals to anyone seeking a reliable short- or long-term partner for Drupal-based development, capable of rendering high-quality deliverables in a multi-vendor environment in a timely manner.
SHOW FULL CASE-STUDY
Jan Guardian
Head of Digital Marketing
Itransition, USA
I worked with the Attico team and personally with Henadzi Koltun in 2018-2019 on the project called the Impact Tracker. It was a complex web product built on Drupal. It needed multiple integrations and constant support.
The Attico team made everything carefully and on time. The delivered service was perfect, both on the front-end and back-end sides.
Henadzi, as a team leader, has excellent communication skills. He is extremely organized, reliable, and flexible. He managed to organize the workflow efficiently, so the team managed to deliver all updates in a timely way and worked perfectly in emergencies.
I plan to continue working with Attico on projects that need special treatment and high-level quality.
SHOW FULL CASE-STUDY
Franak Viacorka
Digital Media Strategist
U.S. Agency for Global Media
Solution: Open Source CMS development
A key problem
Having started the project, we realized that the client did not have an entire platform adapted for managing all websites. It led to an evident absence of the development speed. Each new feature had to be adopted by hundreds of employees all over the world before being implemented to the brand website. At the same time, employees had to learn to work with the new capabilities of the system over and over again.
Our innovative solution
Our solution was to offer the client to cease working with each site individually and develop an Open Source CMS Solution. Instead of creating a separate website for each product and each local market, we deployed a super-platform – a single-core based on Drupal technology.
Super platform capabilities
The super platform allows:
- deploying new websites as quickly as possible,
- migrating old websites to the platform,
- performing the maximum number of integrations.
Participation required from the client
Global managers participated in large releases or presentations of new scopes of work. Their primary goal was to maintain a global vision for the entire project.
Line managers were in charge of the budget. In addition, they had to delve into the platform’s features, functions, and the way it operates to be able to answer the employees' questions.
At a local level, regional managers set tasks to be implemented on the off-on-shelf regional websites. They were also responsible for the content filling of the web page.
Technical hurdles of FMCG software solutions
The key technical hurdles were connected to passing the security scan and GDPR compliance. We took full responsibility for these issues.
Successful security scan passing
Security scans are monolithic corporate requirements that all branches and departments must adhere to. Many development companies put in a large amount of effort to pass through this checkpoint.
We cannot say that we did it on the first attempt. But over time, we learned to pass the security scan as quickly as possible. Now, in 77% of cases, we successfully pass the security scan on the first try. The remaining 23% of cases are completely successful on the second try.
It took us time to achieve such indicators: we learned how to work with the corporate development checklists and completely adapted to corporate rules.
Full GDPR compliance
As our client is involved in the FMCG industry, the company is constantly gathering loads of personal data, as well as taking the right steps to protect data and identifying risks to privacy. For instance, according to the GDPR requirements, our client is obliged to delete user personal data at their request.
At first, the task of secure storage of personal data and their complete deletion at the user’s request was a real challenge for our team. However, we managed to solve this problem by using an SAP CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) product. In Europe, this tool is the recognized standard for storing user data.
By using this tool, we achieved a wonderful user experience on all websites. Indeed, users are able to register, log in, change their preferences, and specify a variety of personal data. It allows the websites to provide users with the most accurate recommendations. Our client, in turn, is completely compliant with EU GDPR requirements.
Launching new websites in local markets
Our task was to develop a product that business users could manage. We tried to make the platform interface extremely intuitive. It allows non-technical specialists to start full-fledged management instantly. For this purpose, we compiled numerous technical user guides and training manuals.
Cost-effective hosting
We moved the previously developed websites to another hosting and deleted the unused modules to save space
This solution has proven to be very successful. The company's specialists calculated that annual savings would reach $8 million if all branches of the corporation were moved to this hosting.
Results: a leap forward for a consumer goods company
3X
increase in the speed of feature delivery
10X
faster time-to-market of new websites
10X
decrease in the number of bugs
In 77%
of cases the security scan is passed on the first try
$8 million annually
cost savings on hosting in case of moving of all corporation branches
% Economies of scale
for the company’s headquarters
100% functionality
for local offices without wasting their budgets
