Case studies

The company

Unilever is a global organisation, with over 400 brands in the nutrition, hygiene and personal-care markets. It has a turnover of more than €40 billion and employs 174,000 people in around 100 countries worldwide. It is headquartered in London.

The challenge

Unilever has a complex web presence, with over 60 sites in 22 languages worldwide. All sites adhere to Unilever’s global web policies, but are managed locally on a devolved publishing structure.

In December 2008, Unilever began a major overhaul of its global web presence to reflect an update to the Unilever brand, and to better serve changing audience needs. “We remained on the same CMS platform, but created a new design, new structure and new navigation.” says Johannah Bailey, Programme Director, Global Communications - External Channels.

Unilever needed a solution to streamline the migration of their existing websites into the new design templates, and ensure that all content met the new brand guidelines and updated web standards. As the rollout of the new sites was scheduled to take place over several months, they also wanted to ensure that the quality and compliance of their live sites didn’t suffer while attention was focused on the relaunch process. 

The solution

Magus is supporting Unilever during the relaunch process by running two instances of the ActiveStandards platform in parallel: one configured for the "old" sites and one for the new sites.

Unilever have been using ActiveStandards for several years, and they continue to use the system on their old sites, while the new sites are under development. “It means that while countries are preparing their sites for migration, they can run ActiveStandards as usual and it will alert them to mistakes,” says Bailey.

A second instance of the ActiveStandards platform has been configured to match Unilever’s new brand and template standards.  This initially monitors the new sites whilst they are being developed in the staging environment. This enables the editors to perform detailed quality assurance before the new sites go live, and provides managers with clear visibility of the compliance status of each site, streamlining the sign-off process. Once each site goes live, ActiveStandards continues to monitor it within the production environment, ensuring complete coverage throughout the website lifecycle.

The result

Magus ActiveStandards helps Unilever streamline a complex launch process, and ensure all new sites go live fully compliant with the new brand guidelines.

“The QA process can be very difficult if you have to make decisions on a case-by-case basis,” says Bailey. “Because ActiveStandards is completely automated it takes the complexity out of this process - it’s fantastic”.

Using ActiveStandards to streamline website relaunch has delivered significant benefits for Unilever:

• Easy error resolution. “ActiveStandards is a great tool. It enables very quick access to errors and the ability to rectify those errors,” says Bailey. “Because ActiveStandards is integrated with the production environment, you can click through directly to each affected page: it shows you where the mistake is on the page, and tells you what you need to do to rectify it. The simple signposting takes away the pain of thinking ‘What am I supposed to do here?’”
• Eliminates human error. ActiveStandards provides instant analysis and reporting across the entire web presence, going far beyond the scope of manual verification. “Let’s face it – when you’re working online and you’ve been staring at a box all day, it’s quite easy to miss things,” says Bailey. “We all do it. Having a platform that already knows what the guidelines and checkpoints are, and sends you straight to them is very, very helpful.”
• Protects brand consistency. “You need some uniformity if you want to maintain a consistent corporate presence,” continues Bailey. “ActiveStandards helps create uniformity for the corporate brand across all the external sites.”
• Increased productivity. By automating standards compliance, ActiveStandards radically reduces the time and effort involved. “I see it as a timesaving tool. If it wasn’t being done electronically, somebody would have to do it manually and I dread to think how much time that would take,” says Bailey.

Working with Magus

“I really like working with them,” says Bailey. “They’re intelligent people, collaborative, open, and very honest – and easy to work with because of that. Our web-editor community like ActiveStandards a lot.”