Customer Solution Case Study
/ Audio Company Enhances Image, Cuts Costs with Global Web Content Management
Overview
Country or Region: Japan
Industry: Manufacturing—High Tech and Electronics
Customer Profile
D&M Holdings, based in Japan, with 2,500 employees, markets its premium audio and video equipment through brands that include Denon, Marantz, McIntosh, and Boston Acoustics.
Business Situation
D&M Holdings needed centralized management of its brand websites to improve marketing and reduce costs.
Solution
D&M Holdings used Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as the foundation for enterprise web content management. Marketing teams control content and distribute it to 74 sites.
Benefits
- Simplified web content management
- Better user experience boosts marketing success
- Better collaboration, less complexity, big savings
- Streamlined development and integration
Vaishali Benner, Director of Strategic Marketing, D&M Holdings
D&M Holdings manufactures nine brands of premium consumer electronics, including Denon and Marantz, and sells its products in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. The company needed to streamline management of its brand websites to improve marketing and reduce costs. D&M Holdings selected Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites as the foundation for a global web content management system. With the solution, the company has consolidated nine different website platforms into one, centralized content management for its marketing teams, and created a cohesive brand image. Website user experience has improved so much that the number of visitors leaving the site after viewing only one or two pages has dropped nearly 25 percent. Further, the company expects to recover its investment in the solution in just one year, due to reduced IT complexity and software licensing costs.
Situation
D&M Holdings, a privately owned electronics company headquartered in Japan, produces and markets premium audio and video electronics equipment. Its nine brands are renowned for quality and innovation, and their longevity proves this: Denon, established in 1910, just celebrated its 100-year anniversary. Other D&M Holdings brands include Marantz, McIntosh, Boston Acoustics, Denon DJ, Calrec, and Allen & Heath.
D&M Holdings has grown through acquisitions and has marketing, manufacturing, and distribution centers in the Asia Pacific region, North America, and Europe. As a result of its acquisitions, D&M Holdings experienced a proliferation of disparate IT systems and services, including more than 200 consumer websites which were based on nine different technology platforms such as the PHP scripting language, and Adobe ColdFusion. It also relied on the services of multiple hosting providers and third-party design and development firms to maintain these websites. “Our hosting, development, and software costs were very high,” says Lalit Panda, Chief Information Officer at D&M Holdings. “And, we did not have centralized control over our website source code or content.”
D&M Holdings must coordinate product branding and website management efforts among marketing offices and distributors. However, the decentralized website environment challenged the company’s global marketing efforts. Each region, country, and even product distributor developed its own website content. Thus, it was impossible for the company to maintain a cohesive brand image. “Our global brand websites lacked design and branding continuity, and this negatively affected our marketing exposure,” says Vaishali Benner, Director of Strategic Marketing at D&M Holdings.
Furthermore, creating or modifying website content was a time-consuming and costly process. Many of the company’s websites relied on older content management software, but, says Benner, “Using our legacy platform, it took a few hours to do a simple task like post a new product to a website.” To offload this burden for the marketing department, the company hired a freelancer to update its websites, which resulted in additional costs. Also, it was difficult to feature product promotions because the structure of the websites varied enormously. For instance, only some D&M Holdings sites could support banner ads. Therefore, ads had to be created in different sizes, using different creative material, which further increased costs and impeded collaboration. “Requirements varied so much that our marketing teams had no reason to work together on design or messaging.”
For its European sites, which span many countries and cultures, D&M Holdings found it extremely challenging to support multiple versions of the same content in different languages. Each country built and maintained individual websites for each supported language, which totaled 22 websites in all. “We couldn’t maintain brand consistency because the central European office wasn’t controlling content for all the sites,” says Bert Kiggen, Director of Product and Marketing at D&M Holdings in Europe. “Nothing was shared. This wasn’t a sustainable strategy for meeting our objectives of premium brand management and effective cost containment.”
And for customers, the website experience was less than ideal. For example, on some D&M Holdings sites search functionality was limited, while other sites did not even support search functionality. Navigation was cumbersome, and customers found it challenging to locate product information. Because users could not find what they were looking for, the “bounce rate,” or rate at which visitors left the websites after viewing just one or two pages, was high. “On the Denon U.S. site, our bounce rate was 30 percent,” says Benner. To improve the user experience, D&M Holdings turned to outside vendors to provide enhancements to search functionality and other components of the sites. “We were spending money to fix something that was truly broken. We were using stopgap measures when we really needed a complete website infrastructure overhaul.”
Solution
In late 2009, D&M Holdings conducted a thorough evaluation of web content management systems, including solutions from EMC and Autonomy Interwoven. It also evaluated Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites. The company’s primary requirements of the new platform were that it help to reduce cost and complexity, integrate well with the rest of the company’s IT infrastructure, was easy-to-use for nontechnical people, and could extend to support future integrations, such as e-commerce, customer relationship management, and a company intranet. “On all those points, SharePoint 2010 proved to be the best solution,” says Panda.
D&M Holdings then engaged Omnie Solutions, a Microsoft Registered Partner with expertise with Microsoft SharePoint Server, to help the company design, develop, and implement an enterprise web content management solution based on SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites. “Omnie is our go-to partner in this project,” says Benner. “The company understands our business and how to address our needs in the SharePoint environment.”
In March 2010, Omnie Solutions helped D&M Holdings begin a global migration of its websites. The project includes consolidating more than 200 disparate sites to 74, centralizing content management to core marketing teams in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region, and relocating website infrastructure to the D&M Holdings North American headquarters in Mahwah, New Jersey.
Creating an Engaging User Experience
The new D&M Holdings sites feature streamlined navigation and easy-to-browse product catalogs. Developers used the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate development system, Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Web Parts, and Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 to create a rich, interactive user experience. (See Figure 1 for an example of one of these new sites.) D&M Holdings incorporated animations to boost visibility for products and services being promoted, and mapping functionality to help customers locate nearby resellers. Developers also used SharePoint list functionality to create a repository to store and manage product catalog data. “Visual Studio 2010, and its seamless connection to SharePoint Server 2010, helps our team dramatically,” says Niraj Patpatia, Technical Architect and Senior Business Analyst at Omnie Solutions. “We can deploy code directly within the SharePoint Server environment.”
Centralizing Web Content Management
Developers customized the environment using out-of-the-box SharePoint Server 2010 features such as master pages and page layouts, which allow D&M Holdings to create and maintain “templates” that include site design and branding guidelines for each brand. Content owners in each brand’s marketing department use a web-based text editor to modify site content without help from the IT department. The site templates also allow D&M Holdings to quickly and easily deploy new sites as it enters new markets or works with new distributors.
D&M Holdings relies on the variations feature of SharePoint Server 2010 to disseminate content from its core marketing sites to individual country or distributor sites. For instance, the core marketing team in Europe, which is based in the Netherlands, creates website content for all of the company’s European sites. An automated workflow in SharePoint Server 2010 ensures that content is routed to and reviewed by a designated series of approvers such as copywriters, editors, designers, and marketing managers. All digital assets, including graphics, logos, text, and multimedia files, are stored in a central repository in SharePoint lists. Individual site owners select the assets they need such as graphics and website copy, translate the content, and publish it in their respective languages. Global changes (such as modifying site navigation) are automatically propagated to all the sites.
Integrating and Improving Search
To help customers find information more easily, the company employed search functionality in SharePoint Server 2010. Using managed metadata capabilities in SharePoint Server, D&M Holdings centrally defines taxonomies for its website content, which allows the company to easily manage and apply tags to website content to deliver context-sensitive search results. This metadata tagging capability also helps the company increase its visibility in search engines and attract more customers to its sites.
Connecting to Social Networking Sites
D&M Holdings also uses configurable Web Parts in SharePoint Server 2010 to connect its websites to popular social media forums such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. This is just the first step in the company’s strategy to capitalize on technology to increase exposure for its brand. D&M Holdings plans to extend this connection to its customer relationship management (CRM) system. “For instance, if a customer comments on a product through a social networking site, this detail will be captured in CRM,” explains Benner.
Consolidating Infrastructure
Previously, D&M Holdings maintained website infrastructure in dispersed data centers in multiple countries. The new infrastructure is located in a single data center in New Jersey, where two servers run the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and SharePoint Server 2010, and two servers run Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise data management software. Active Directory Domain Services provides user authentication capabilities to manage access to the authoring environment. D&M Holdings uses the content deployment feature of SharePoint Server 2010 to schedule and control the publishing of content from its authoring environment to the production environment, and it relies on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 to manage and monitor the health of its SharePoint Server environment and to help ensure top performance and availability.
Future Plans
In April 2011, after gathering and organizing data from its 200 disparate sites and finalizing guidelines for a new global brand image, D&M Holdings completed its migration of the Denon, Marantz, and McIntosh websites to SharePoint Server 2010. “The development was one of the quickest parts of this comprehensive brand revitalization process,” explains Manish Om Maheshwary, Chief Executive Officer at Omnie Solutions. The company plans to complete the migration of its remaining six brand sites to the new platform by August 2011. In future phases, D&M Holdings plans to deploy an e-commerce platform to enhance its business-to-business sales capabilities, using Microsoft Commerce Server 2009. The company will use Microsoft BizTalk Server 2010 to enable interoperation among SharePoint Server 2010, Commerce Server 2009, the company’s Oracle-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, as well as third-party shipping and taxation service providers.
Benefits
Using SharePoint Server 2010, D&M Holdings has simplified its web content management processes, empowered its marketing departments, reduced IT costs, improved customer experience, and streamlined its development efforts.
Simplified Web Content Management
In its previous environment, content for each country and distributor website was developed independently, with no oversight from core marketing teams. D&M Holdings managed and maintained more than 200 websites. With SharePoint Server 2010, D&M Holdings has reduced the number of sites by more than 50 percent. The company uses features such as master pages, page layouts, and site variations to enable its marketing teams in Europe, North America, and the Asia Pacific region to manage website content for the company’s nine brands and distribute it for publication to 74 sites, in 18 countries, and 10 languages. “With SharePoint Server 2010, the process is so simple that our marketing staff can make quick modifications and updates to the sites without IT intervention,” says Benner. “That was impossible for us to do, before. It took hours of our time and we had to engage outside resources. The improvement is astronomical.”
Alex Alexandrou, Vice President of Web Technology at D&M Holdings adds, “With SharePoint Server 2010 as our global web content management system, our environment is vastly simpler. We can now truly support the marketing department in its efforts to build and maintain a strong, global brand presence.”
Better User Experience Boosts Marketing Success
Now that all D&M Holdings sites are based on a common infrastructure, the company’s dispersed marketing teams can use the same website assets—such as creative campaign materials for a product promotion—across multiple sites. The consistency results in a better customer experience. “Before, among regions, our brand sites had a very disjointed look and feel. SharePoint Server 2010 helped us build a much more standardized, streamlined, impactful brand image,” says Benner.
Greater consistency, improved navigation, engaging content that includes rich multimedia experiences, and enhanced search capabilities all contribute to a better customer experience.“ The bounce rate for our Denon site has decreased by 29 percent—that’s almost a 100 percent improvement since implementing SharePoint Server 2010,” says Benner. In addition, D&M Holdings takes advantage of the extensible nature of the SharePoint Server 2010 environment to improve customer service in creative ways. For instance, by integrating its CRM system with SharePoint Server 2010, D&M Holdings will be able to capture key customer information through the website. “When a customer posts to Facebook or Twitter about one of our products, we can capture those details in CRM,” explains Benner. “This will provide us with valuable insight into the customer’s situation should they later contact us with a question or a service request.”
Better Collaboration, Less Complexity Means Big Savings
Enterprise web content management capabilities have helped D&M Holdings marketing teams achieve better brand consistency, innovation, and cost savings. “Now that all regions have the same website capabilities, if one region creates a unique website innovation or enhancement, all regions benefit from it,” explains Benner. “Essentially, we are now splitting many of our design, marketing, and development costs three ways, among Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific instead of creating similar features, functionalities, or product promotions three different times.”
Additionally, the common platform encourages collaboration. “Before, we had little reason to collaborate on a global scale because each region had its separate challenges to overcome and technologies to work within,” says Kiggen. “Now, we are working with the same tools, in the same environment. SharePoint Server 2010 has helped us collaborate and cooperate on a global scale.”
From an IT perspective, SharePoint Server 2010 helps D&M Holdings reduce costs by reducing IT complexity. “All of our brand websites are now hosted centrally in the same data center. We have reduced our footprint and increased our control,” says Panda. “Enhancing our marketing efforts and achieving operational cost savings are essential to our success.” D&M Holdings will recoup its investment in SharePoint Server 2010 quickly. “The money we are saving in hosting, development, and software licensing costs will result in a return on our investment in SharePoint Server 2010 in just one year,” says Panda. “And that is not including the time savings we are realizing from the decreased burden of content management on our IT staff.”
Streamlined Development and Integration
The SharePoint Server 2010 environment also streamlines development and integration work for Omnie Solutions and D&M Holdings. “With SharePoint Server 2010, we reduce our time-to-market for websites by approximately 30 percent,” says Om Maheshwary. “I attribute this to out-of-the-box functionality, such as prebuilt SharePoint Server Web Parts, and easy connection to other systems.”
Alexandrou adds, “With SharePoint Server 2010 and the rest of our Microsoft-based environment, we experience tight integration and strong product support. In this environment, we don’t need to do special, complex integrations to get things to work. We have the luxury of working with products that are easy to integrate and work within the Microsoft .NET Framework to expand our capabilities enterprisewide.”