Business challenges
Our client needed to expand their online presence internationally with ease and confidence using Oracle WebCenter Sites on Amazon Web Services. Some challenges that needed to be overcome to meet this goal included:
- In an effort to continue to expand their global online presence, Cargill needed the ability to quickly and easily replicate and deploy websites internationally.
- The organization had been customizing on an older CMS for several years and realized it was time to standardize the platform on supported technology. They selected Oracle WebCenter Sites to meet their goals.
- They lacked in-house skills for implementing, deploying and managing WebCenter Sites. Resources skilled in WebCenter Sites were hard to find, making hiring an in house resource difficult.
- They had very aggressive timelines for deployment.
- They were open to a hosted solution and had a relationship with AWS but wanted a single vendor and contract that could meet all their needs.
The solution
- After a three-day onsite discovery workshop was conducted, a business requirements document, annotated screenshots, technical design specification, and an implementation plan and estimates were provided and approved.
- The solution included a fully hosted and managed WebCenter Sites solution architected and deployed on EC2 instances on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Development followed a sprint-based approach with frequent demos, client training, and UAT after every sprint. Since Cargill’s team consisted mainly of IT folks, the CMS configuration definition and development went smoothly due to the level of understanding of CMS tools.
- The WebCenter Sites Platform was designed and developed to support Cargill’s business needs. A production-ready site for their German site, Cargill.de was completed as a pilot.
- Training was conducted and the Cargill team added content, configured the site, and launched it successfully on AWS.
- HGS Digital provided ongoing 24/7 monitoring and managed services for both the application and infrastructure.
Results
- Cargill is now able to quickly and easily replicate sites—nationally and internationally—for fast deployment.
- They experienced a smooth and timely transition to the new web content management system with no need to hire new application experts.
- By leveraging HGS Digital’s prebuilt core application development framework, they expedited deployment times.
- By taking advantage of the “clone and launch” approach, they were able to easily scale their initial website up to 68 properties now live on the cloud-based content management solution and take advantage of the following benefits:
- Unified code-base across all sites.
- Decoupled design with configurable display modules enables flexible site assembly and minimize coding effort.
- Enhances editorial distribution.
- Scalable site theming & styling.
- Design patterns tha enable a plug-n-play approach to generating new sites, associated repositories, as well as display modules.
- By choosing an AWS deployment as opposed to premise, they dramatically reduced their time to deployment, are guaranteed 99.999% uptime, can deliver a stable and consistent user experience to their clients and enjoy a reduced TCO.
- By leveraging HGS Digital’s managed services and 24/7 monitoring service, their workload is supported at both the environment and application level, will stay current, and frees their IT team to focus on driving other business goals.
Visualization of project outcomes:
