The customer
AGC Glass Europe is the European glass branch of AGC, the world leader in flat glass, which manufactures, processes and distributes flat glass for the construction, automotive and solar panel industries.
The project
Like many companies, AGC faces multiple challenges with its digital channels. Amongst them, agility and customer centricity are the top priorities.
In 2015, the IT architecture had to be upgraded to deliver an appropriate response to these requirements.
The digital approach chiefly revolved around their website and their B2B e-commerce site. However, the solutions brought not in line with current digital developments. The solutions put in place were not up to scratch in terms of mobility and responsiveness.
Moreover, both the website and the e-commerce platform had reached the end of their service life. Which presented a good opportunity to think about the future.
Challenge
The challenges encountered in implementing the new solution were :
- Technology : the need to rely on an integrated architecture
- Human : new processes had to be put in place to centralize the marketing information in order to insure consistency across all the digital channels
Approach
After a rapid assessment of the business requirements and the current IT architecture, AGC and Contraste Digital have defined together the target architecture.
The purpose of the new architecture was to enable and support the digital presence of AGC and to meet the agility needs of the business.
A roadmap planning took into account the business objectives as well as the IT constraints.
The priorities were given on the PIM implementation and the deployment of a new product website and a new B2B e-commerce platform. In the approach adopted, taking into account the expectations of the business has been decisive : customer centric, agile and optimizing costs.
Solution
To centralise the marketing data of the products, AGC went with the PIM solution. Thanks to this solution, AGC is able to ensure the coherence of its product data on all its digital channels.
The European « product » website was rebuilt from scratch using CMS Drupal as the CMS of choice. A personalised Drupal distribution was implemented to enable AGC to standardise its information websites for local products. This personalised distribution incorporates single sign-on authentication. The roadmap also plans for migration to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), specifically for the value-added service tools such as the product configurator.
The launch of the European « product » website also constituted the perfect occasion to migrate the first tools. These first stages of the target architecture were put in place by Contraste Digital over a 5-month project, which enabled AGC to accomplish its commercial goals.
