Johnson & Johnson multisite case study
CASE STUDIES

Johnson & Johnson

One of the most trusted names in healthcare products trusted Adyax with their digital needs.

solutions
benefits
  • Better Cost Control
  • Business Efficiency
  • Consistent Brand Identity
  • Dedicated Digital Partner
  • Ease of Maintenance
  • Efficient Product Development
  • Faster Speed to Market
  • Localization / Global Reach
  • Improved Performance
  • More Creative Freedom
  • Process Efficiency
  • Technical Consolidation
         
01

Challenge

Being a Fortune 500 company, Johnson & Johnson has digital property spanning the globe from its products and brands. Streamlining the release and management of these brands was essential.

Operating out of over 60 companies utilizing thousands of websites spanning a variety of languages, products, and geographies, a centralized and standardized approach to digital was essential for the company, their partners, and their stakeholders. This made them an ideal partner for Adyax’s technical platform management partnership offering. 

When Johnson & Johnson first selected Adyax to redesign a site for a major brand, we noticed that the lack of site consolidation was causing redundancy in effort and requiring publishing workflows that were far more complex than necessary. Prior to our work, various regions and brands were using many different hosts and developers, leading to a lack of project governance across the digital portfolio and requiring many unusual considerations and specialists to make things work.

We knew that, once implemented, this solution would lead to exponential cost savings (reduced total cost of ownership) as well as improved performance and creative freedom.

Johnson & Johnson Drupal case study - multisite
Therefore, while working on websites for three websites, Biafine, Listerine and Neutrogena, we also proposed a more efficient way to deploy and manage websites across countries and brands - a streamlined, consolidated, Drupal multisite solution which was uniquely designed to suit their needs.
         
02

Solution

The resulting Drupal multisite solution has a master website and replicable processes for quickly creating a new site within a series of steps for the creative and content team, but with far less dependency on technical teams for development or deployment.

At Adyax, we pride ourselves on our ability to be flexible and work with a customer’s existing teams, resources, governance, business processes and restrictions, to arrive at an approach that serves both innovation and the best interest of the business. We therefore assessed the situation across geographies and brands, planning the larger picture, yet starting with a single site to validate the proposed structure.

This Drupal enterprise site factory approach allows for the build and launch of many sites for the cost of just a few. A company can quickly spin-up a new site within a replica of the established structure of an existing site, then configure and customize the new site specific to the needs of the brand or business.

For the Johnson & Johnson Drupal multisite project, we made use of the open source Aegir multisite distribution (http://www.aegirproject.org/). The solution allows for many brands to share a common core, while also allowing for technical changes on a per-brand level, including brand by brand support for hosting preferences. The site architecture is common across all sites, making them easier to upgrade and maintain. The approach allows for a Drupal multi-site management program that starts with one site but can be expanded to streamline application and website management initiatives over time as part of a program to improve efficiency, consolidation efforts and reduce costs.

Johnson & Johnson Drupal case study - multisite - products
We completed the first site and then continued on to complete multi-country deployment of hundreds of additional sites as part of the larger program.

To support Johnson & Johnson's preference for a clear approvals process due to time restrictions on the project, we were able to set up a full service team dedicated to completing their project in a limited series of sprints, all on a fixed budget. 



 
Johnson & Johnson Drupal case study - multisite

 

 

We are a flexible, innovative and dedicated partner. When certain brand program managers preferred to work agile, we shifted our dedicated team to an agile scrum process for the duration of that particular site’s redesign and launch. We also defined and designed APIs to allow for the Drupal multisite to act as a centralized content store in service of various iOS and Android applications, also built by Adyax. Our coordinated approach allowed for the repeated use of assets such as templates and architectural elements, as well as the use of content templates for quick upload of content by the marketing teams into the new sites. We set up a full service dedicated team, from conception to multi-country deployment. In each case we address specific needs, such as a country’s legal terms and rights management issues, deployment, translation, security and performance audits. Starting with a batch of D6 sites in 2011 - including Listerine and Neutrogena - we built a common installation profile. This included identifying standard contrib modules, such as Apache Solr and Varnish. Using the Aegir control panel to simplify deployment and management, we moved many sites from different hosts to our custom cloud hosting solution.

Brands now share the same host and can work independently, but on the same “doc root” (core instance of Drupal), avoiding multiple repositories and redundancy of code. Additionally, in order to ensure that multiple brands or agencies can work on solutions for the brands, we introduced a custom code verification process which blocks non-compliant code, ensuring sites are built to best-practice and in compliance with the approved Johnson & Johnson Drupal multisite distribution.

 

Johnson & Johnson Drupal case study - multisite - grass
         
03

Benefits

Johnson & Johnson optimized the user and business experience for thousands of sites across numerous brands as a result of the work.

Given their myriad brand marketing needs, they continue to encounter brands and regions requesting site redesign, upgrades, management. As a dedicated partner, we are always happy to assist other agencies wishing to work on the Drupal multisite platform we created. Whether or not Adyax is doing the work, the approach has been optimized and the work can be done faster and more efficiently, with technical elegance throughout. As part of the partnership, we optimized the approach to website program governance and project planning, with clarification for necessary steps all the way from analysis and user experience workshops, through design, development and testing cycles, to fully-integrated multilingual website delivery. The result is time and cost savings, for anyone doing the work.

Faster time to market 50%
Johnson & Johnson Drupal case study - multisite

In effect, we worked for several years as an expansion of Johnson & Johnson’s centralized IT team, as their dedicated Drupal experts, overseeing the planning and deployment of a massive number of website onto the centralized Drupal multisite solution to empower their brands.

  • YEAR 2015
  • INDUSTRY Healthcare
  • COMPANY Johnson & Johnson
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