Nilfisk-Advance needed to step up its web strategy for its North America operations across several companies that worked together in some aspects but in many cases operated independently. The first to be addressed was the Advance brand which for all intents and purposes, did not really have a significant website. Advance, a division of Nilfisk-Advance, had only a one-page site for their North America operations. They needed a new site to showcase Advance floor cleaning machines that was inline with their corporate marketing guidelines. Equally as important, they also needed a content management system to store their marketing and technical product data for multiple uses throughout the company.
Flexibility was key with the new site. First of all, we had to design one that had room to grow and could eventually integrate with a backend ERP system for e-commerce. Also, this was the first of several redesign projects for Nilfisk-Advance's North America operations; a lot of upfront planning and strategy were involved so the other brands could benefit. We had to build a sound content structure that was reusable for the other divisions. In other words, when applied to the other websites, the structure for Advance's site had to make sense for the others as well.
The CMS that we used was Sitecore, a content management system of excellent functionality and flexibility built on the Microsoft .NET framework. This is why it was the perfect choice for this project. Its flexibility allowed us to customize the CMS so that one Sitecore content template could be shared among the websites for the other divisions and many other back-end applications could plug right into the CMS. With the website's future in mind, we developed plans to integrate Advance's site with their existing extranet, to allow for e-commerce later.
Next up was Clarke, another brand of Nilfisk-Advance. Roundedcube completely redesigned and redeveloped the Clarke company website. Roundedcube implemented the Sitecore Content Management System (CMS) and also developed a new e-commerce extranet to allow dealers to purchase the equipment online. Since Clarke is not a typical B2C e-commerce retailer but rather sells to specific dealers (B2B) with product costs ranging into the thousands, a typical e-commerce solution would not have sufficed. Not only that, but the nature of Clarke’s products is that, much like a laptop, these products are highly configurable and every dealer purchases the products with a slew of custom configurations, options and accessories.
The primary achievement of the project in terms of PIMS was the design and development of a completely customized extranet for dealers to be able to select equipment, configure the equipment to their needs, and of course purchase the resulting products. Also created was an app for dealers to order products strictly by product number for those that knew exactly what they needed to order and could bypass the browse/add-to-cart process. All development was done in .NET including customization of the CMS and the creation of Web Services using Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) built on top of Clarke’s existing JD Edwards/AS400 product information management system.
The next brand to get the treatment was Kent-Euroclean, the value-end brand of the group. Roundedcube completely redesigned and redeveloped the Kent-Euroclean company website too. Just like the other brands, Sitecore served as the foundation. Similar to Advance and unlike Clarke, instead of the full-blown custom e-commerce, Kent-Euroclean's website was built to integrate into the company's existing reseller extranet to provide additional functionality to partners.