Business challenges
Beachbody’s challenges came down to three things: content updates, ecommerce, and tying it all together with both technology and data. All of their properties are content-driven, ranging from video to imagery to text, and most are based around an e-commerce call-to-action.
To keep customers engaged, Beachbody’s marketing and business users needed to be able to update content quickly and go live simultaneously on all of the appropriate channels. But when the project started, updates could take between 5 and 10 days for new content to be available to customers, and then only when the IT team was enlisted to help. In addition, the ecommerce experience was inconsistent across their properties, particularly at checkout.
Individually, Beachbody’s challenges could be met by multiple Oracle technologies, WebCenter Sites for content management and ATG for ecommerce. Oracle’s Endeca solution was the ideal technology to provide valuable data from their web platforms for their business. But for best results, Beachbody wanted to tie these solutions together into a single, customized integration.
One of the biggest challenges to the Beachbody implementation was that there was no defined architecture for the kind of integration that Beachbody wanted to create. This was going to be the first full integration between WebCenter Sites, ATG and Endeca and it needed to work on a large scale, spanning all of Beachbody’s web properties.
The solution
The team realized that instead of rolling out the solution in multiple waves with multiple properties launching simultaneously, they could mitigate risk and speed up future launches by focusing on a single web property.
The first phase was to launch a new iteration of UltimateReset.com, a single property within the Beachbody web environment that has enough traffic to monitor for success, but is also small enough to address content and technology issues quickly. Technology would need to be well-defined and all processes would be established through this launch.
UltimateReset.com was designed and developed with clean architecture, and the integration between systems was clear and seamless. It can be scaled up, expanded on, and replicated across Beachbody’s web environment. And when UltimateReset.com launched in October 2014, HGS Digital’s integration had zero defects and was 100% operational. No user bugs were reported, and Beachbody updated content instantly in response to business data.
Results
Beachbody plans on HGS Digital playing a key role in the success of the rest of the rollout. HGS Digital will augment CMS services, as well as act in a consulting role for finding resources to work within Beachbody’s infrastructure. In addition, HGS Digital will provide training for staff and eventually support and maintenance as well.
