Glen Dimplex Group
new sites in the past 4 years
Highlights
The company needed its websites to serve dual purposes, speaking to both business and end users.
With an extensive product range and dozens of sites with disparate technologies, branding, and user experiences, Glen Dimplex needed a centralized, flexible solution.
Drupal 9, Acquia Site Factory, Acquia Cloud Edge
Acquia lets Glen Dimplex rapidly deploy new sites in weeks; over the past four years, the company has launched 60 new sites.
The Client
A privately owned business with a 50-year heritage in manufacturing, Ireland-based Glen Dimplex Group works across an international footprint in heating and ventilation, flame, precision cooling, and consumer appliances. Its portfolio of products and solutions span the living and working environment, all created with a simple and shared mindset of empowering daily life.
The Situation
Glen Dimplex is primarily a business-to-business company – aimed at dealers, wholesalers, engineers, and architects, among others – but it also has several direct-to-consumer channels. This means that some of its sites must serve a dual purpose: communicating with businesses and end users, even though the consumer isn’t purchasing directly from the site.
The Challenge
With its extensive product range – from kettles and toasters to residential and industrial heating solutions – each Glen Dimplex site has a specific target audience instead of a common companywide audience. The company’s main challenge was to streamline and reduce the number of sites it had while effectively addressing the demands of its diverse audiences.
Additionally, each region controlled and managed its own website – including the technology it was built on, branding, security, site layout, and messaging – leading to little consistency between sites. And site updates were arduous; something as simple as updating an image often required outside help. The company wanted to find a way to centralize all site aspects while still allowing regional businesses autonomy over their content.
The Solution
Glen Dimplex gathered requirements from its stakeholders across the globe, then created a roadmap for development. The company chose Drupal as its CMS, believing it provided the end user with the ultimate combination of ease of use and customization, thanks to its Layouts and Paragraphs features.
With a desire to create code once and replicate it as needed across sites, Glen Dimplex’s digital team (led by Jonathan Webb and with Matthew Stocker as their technical product owner) then worked with digital agency Dept to deploy Acquia Site Factory. Instead of being stuck following a template, content editors can take advantage of Site Factory’s common code base, using its component library to create sites and pages that fit their region’s unique offerings and audience needs – while still maintaining consistent branding. In addition, when the digital team introduced new functionality — like a “find a dealer” widget or a heat loss calculator — it could build that functionality once, then release it to production across multiple global sites. This saved time and money and enhanced the user experience.
To power its digital efforts, creating brochureware and transactional sites across three continents, multiple countries, and countless languages, Glen Dimplex embraced a three-pillar tech stack with the support of digital agency partners. In addition to working with Dept on the Site Factory deployment, Glen Dimplex partnered with Lab Digital for support with commercetools, and SQLI for support with Informatica. The partnerships allowed Glen Dimplex to ensure its product catalog served as the company’s single source of truth and powered e-commerce sites across the globe — each pillar provided necessary support for the others.
The Results
Over the past four years, Glen Dimplex has launched 60 new sites — some completed in weeks and all completed in a fraction of the time it previously took the company to deploy new sites. Its first site — a non-transactional static site that needed to be transformed into a multi-language, multi-region site — was completed in nine months. The second site, an e-commerce transactional site, was completed in just six months.
Internal feedback from users — primarily members of the company’s marketing and merchandising teams — is that the new platform is easy to use. Adoption across the company has been “amazing” and site editors appreciate that they need very little training to get started. In addition, Glen Dimplex Group’s digital team created a self-serve resource center that allows users to quickly access answers to frequently asked questions, providing users with easy-to-access support. Using Site Factory allowed Glen Dimplex’s global teams to autonomously update and manage their own sites with ease.
Consumer feedback has been positive, and customers appreciate that features like product manuals, installation guides, warranty information, and project registration are easy to find and use.
The company aims to migrate 100 sites to Site Factory, taking advantage of its centralized management and easy-to-use functionality. In addition to exploring personalization, Glen Dimplex’s digital team is actively pursuing ways to create a more holistic user experience across individual brands.
