Berenschot Digital
A corporate platform for content, commerce and digital services
A seamless experience for content editors and advisers
What had to be done
Berenschot is a leading independent management consultancy firm with 350 employees worldwide. As the world is accelerating in digital services, Berenschot also needs to transform and acquire a new brand identity as well. Their new digital platform had several challenges that came from different departments but needed to be integrated tightly together to function as one platform.
First of all, there was a need for a new website and corporate identity that had to be extended with ''My Berenschot'', which is a client portal. The client portal featured products that could be purchased, but could also be connected to a client platform which is a white-label website. Combining all these use cases within one digital platform called for additional integrations such as single sign-on and shared component libraries.
The way to success
We worked together with the Berenschot team in an Agile way, providing enough space for both teams to put in their knowledge and skills. This provided for an optimal result that we couldn’t have thought of this way before the start of the project. Having both Marketing and IT Product Owners, we could fill in the needs of both business units, which were often different but always connected in some technical or functional way. With their current digital platform, though, these were all separate solutions that weren’t connected and sometimes featured different agencies. That would cause the transfer or copying of data and slow time to market.
With the new digital platform built on three separate Umbraco instances, we could still separate the solutions on a functional level, but also provide for shared component libraries and single sign-on services to accommodate the customer journey for both clients and employees. Some of the components could also be provided in a different way for a different user; e.g. a marketeer would have a different way to integrate PowerBI reports than an IT power user, who could basically program and filter the report in the Umbraco environment.
In the end, we created a new digital platform that serves the clients of Berenschot but also empowers their employees to reduce their effort to maintain and extend it. This has resulted in lower costs and a dramatical drop-in time to market. Berenschot is now ready to accelerate their digital transformation even faster and further into the future.
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To technically meet our client's wishes, we used Umbraco to realize an environment where content editors could create fully customizable content and client portals, which are optimized for search engines (SEO) and are in conformity with the mobile-friendly design. In addition, we also used Umbraco to create a customer portal, where visitors could go through the checkout process, login and manage their orders, and a simplified product information management (PIM) system, where our client could manage all the available product-types, products and variants in the back-office.
To achieve a high degree of customizability, we have used custom components in addition to the Umbraco Grid. Since the website needed to contain more than 1000 pages, we made a lot of use of Umbraco’s content compositions to provide every page with the same properties related to SEO, interlinking- and displaying content. The interlinking of content with the help of content pickers, in turn, made it possible to create a platform that is fully searchable and filterable on multiple levels. Furthermore, the platform also contains over 250 adviser profiles, that needed to be accessible for the adviser in question. Since most of these advisers were not allowed to access any other part of the back-office other than their profile, we used Umbraco’s roles and rights to restrict the advisers to their profiles.
To create a seamless experience for the content editors and advisers we added a single sign-on to Umbraco that made it possible to log in with their Azure AD credentials. The products managed in the PIM system needed to be displayed on the corporate website as well, so we created an API that could distribute the product-information. This information could be requested from the corporate website through an Umbraco Content App, which in turn allowed us to display the information on the front end. In the process, we migrated over 100 cases and Berenschot created over 150 new subpages for their services. To provide for a smooth transition from the old website, over 1.400 URL’s were redirected.
