Case studies

The company

Actavis is one of the world's leading players in the development, manufacture and sale of generic pharmaceuticals. It has more than 10,000 employees in over 40 countries and is headquartered in Iceland.

The challenge

In 2008, Actavis began a major overhaul of its web presence, involving more than 30 sites in over 20 languages. This involved a redesign of many of the older sites, while new sites were added during the same period.

To support the relaunch, Actavis wanted to ensure it had the best framework in place for website governance. Deploying, enforcing and tracking online standards would be crucial to maintaining the compliance of their new sites. Not only did they want to ensure compliance with a set of global best practice standards, they also needed to manage the correct implementation of brand standards and template styles.

 “With such a rapidly growing web presence, I was quite concerned that compliance would become very difficult, very fast,” says Hjordis Arnadottir, Director of External Communications at Actavis. “We wanted to find a solution before things got out of hand,” she says. “The feeling was that this was becoming too big to handle.”

The solution

Actavis selected Magus ActiveStandards to support the migration of their sites to the new CMS and to provide a platform for website governance and compliance.

In early 2009, ActiveStandards was deployed across 20 websites. Another 10 will be added in 2010.

Implementing ActiveStandards enabled Actavis to:

• Automate the monitoring and management of global website standards
• Automate the monitoring and management of multiple brands and template styles
• Perform a thorough QA of newly migrated sites and eliminate key errors pre-launch

• Train new editors in the website standards, as they are introduced to the system
• Track and benchmark performance against KPIs and inform website strategy

“ActiveStandards answered the questions I was having about how to take this up one step,” says Arnadottir. “It enables us to take a structured approach to managing compliance.”

The result

ActiveStandards has delivered clear benefits for Actavis:

• Increased productivity and visibility. Actavis has seen big productivity gains, as online standards enforcement has become fully automated.  “ActiveStandards gives me a good overview of what’s going on,” says Arnadottir, “it shows me where I should be investing more of my time.”
• Protects brand consistency. ActiveStandards has improved the quality of the Actavis web presence and how the brand is reflected online. “That’s the main reason why we’re doing this,” comments Arnadottir. “We want to present a unified web presence, and this platform really helps.”
• Targeted training. With ActiveStandards, Actavis can now see where the problem areas are and address them quickly. I’ve seen quite a few examples of standards being incorrectly implemented on websites, when I thought I’d explained the issue clearly during our web meetings” says Arnadottir. “ActiveStandards helps me identify areas where further training is required”. 
• Reduced error levels. With company-wide standards in place, reducing the number of errors per page becomes something that people now strive for. “It’s not simply a tool to enforce standards - it’s also something that encourages people."
• Objective evidence. ActiveStandards also provides clear, unambiguous evidence of where things are going wrong and why they matter. “Before ActiveStandards, I’d have to go through a page manually and explain the issues to editors”, says Arnadottir. It was a haphazard approach without any sort of structure. ActiveStandards changes all that. I find this very useful.”

Working with Magus

“Dealing with Magus has been very positive. We worked together well on setting up ActiveStandards to precisely meets our needs,” says Arnadottir.