[Music] [Prateek Shrivastav] Okay. Good afternoon, everyone.
Hope you all are having a very exciting Adobe Summit full of learnings and new experiences. And talking of experiences, today in this session, we are addressing a prime topic for all of the practitioners and the marketers as we transform the experiences and operations for our brands and organizations, the requirements for a scalable, standardized, reusable, flexible, and cost-effective web operation system is a must.
Astellas, one of the large global pharma companies in partnership with Accenture, implemented a comprehensive system which fulfills all of these requirements. We'll deep dive into this system in this session.
My name is Prateek Shrivastav, Managing Director and Accenture Adobe Capability Lead in India. And today, I'm elated to have with me two of Astellas leaders who have been part of this entire journey right from research to conceptualization to implementation of the global design system. So I would want to welcome Madan Rajavel and Nicolas Barcza.
Brilliant. So let's start. In this session, we will divide the session into three different parts. The first part, we will talk about the challenges and the strategic directions which Astellas took as they were actually implementing their entire journey from a fragmented web operation system to a very comprehensive design system. We'll talk about the challenges and the strategic shift. Then we will go into the point of how did we execute this entire journey. How did it come to life? Which technology solutions were used? Which Adobe solutions were used along with the other technology solutions? And most importantly, what were the governance? What were the processes which were put into place in order to bring it to life? And lastly, we will talk about the impact it brought to the organization. What were the outcomes which were driven through it for the business? And since this is a continuous journey, right? Where are we right now? What are the best practices and lessons learned which you could actually take up from this session as you implement some of these solutions in your organizations and brands? And what does the future hold for us? How do we keep on working on in elevating this design system to the next level? We'll talk about all of these points. But firstly, let's start with the challenges and the strategic directions which Astellas took. I'll hand over to Nicolas to take it further.
[Nicolas Barcza] As you can imagine, repeating the process over and over across multiple markets just increase the costs and essentially deliver the same project.
Also, if we think about the platforms and the technology stack that you have between multiple local markets, you just increase the cost substantially 'cause you need to maintain multiple hosts, multiple platforms, and multiple technologies. Our third point is time-to-market. Independent workflows on local markets mean that every site requires this length process to go live. It's low in the ability to respond to the market demands, product launch, and seasonal campaigns. This inefficiency is a major roadblock in today's fast-paced digital world.
Ultimately, who is the most affected by all of this challenge? Yes. It's our customers. Imagine their frustration in navigating across different websites if inconsistent structure partly leads to confusion and lack of trust on us. Plus, when our team struggles to keep up this long process, customers may not get the information as fast as they should.
Now let's see how we could overcome all of these challenges. The answer lies in a strategic shift moving away from one off isolated operations to unify a design system-- Sorry. Unifying design, development and technology under a global design system. It's a game-changing framework that transforms how things collaborate, create, and scale digital experience more efficiently. Let's explore some beneficial of this transformation. First one is brand consistent and seamless user experience. A unify design language ensures a cohesive experience across all digital touchpoints, can be web, can be email, can be mobile, and all beyond. This is especially critical in regulated industries like ours in life science and financial servers, when content presentation must be precise and compliant.
The second point is cost reduction and the operation efficiency. Leverage predefined elements and the centralized development team and tech stack. Organization save a lot of time development and maintaining and hosting costs, right? You don't even need to repeat the process over, over with your agencies. Scalability. A successful design adapt to new business needs market nuances and emerging technologies before disrupting the core experience or incurring significant additional costs.
For a structural design system, you can empower your content team to focus on the content because they will not need to think about all of the technology nuances between and how they are going to do this or that they really focus on the content. We all know content is king, right? And you may be wondering what's exactly is the global design system and how does it work? Let's find out in this short video.
[Woman] It is here to improve your website presence through streamlined design, time-saving efficiency, and optimized customer experiences. Why? A model for change to enable engaging content for HCPs and patients through a common design language. So what is a design system? A system of reusable components, guidelines and design principles used for consistent, responsive, modular flexibility and design for use on any device.
A system that allows you to tailor websites to your customers' needs.
Developed with compliance and regulatory standards in mind, giving you the vehicle to focus on producing great online content. Engaging HCPs and patients with dynamic web content, tools, and resources while driving consistency across a connected ecosystem, enabling them to reach the content they need quickly and efficiently. So how will this benefit us? Well, now that you have a better understanding of what does a design system is. Let's break down its core elements. This one is harmonized design principles. Such as standardized typography, spacing, color schemes, iconography. It creates a consistent brand experience across all digital points. Second one is a library of pre-approved components. Buttons, header banners, navigation, content cards, streamline implementation. We choose to focus on innovation rather than evading like a promo elements. A card will be a card in each website. You don't need to make multiple cards. A design system is just not about guidelines. It's actually is a set of governance and documentation and training that you need to put in place, process to make it happen. Governance critical for long-term success. Clear define roles, assess and ownership, ensure like controlled updates, prevent fragmentation, and maintain the quality of the system. A well-designed system strikes the right balance between customization and global scalability. It should allow local customization without compromising its principles. Finally, a design system is never truly finished. It involves user feedback and business needs, regular updates, enhanced functionality, and ensure ongoing relevance.
Alright. So what we've seen is the challenge that we had and what are the benefits and how we laid out the strategy. The upcoming slides describe how we executed the strategy into action.
We all know, execution in a global organization is no easy feat.
To explain this, I'll use an acknowledging of constructing a new house that most of us can either relate to or have encountered in the past.
When constructing a new house, identifying the site or a location is a crucial first step.
This requires research into various factors, such as access to work, school, shopping, entertainment, most importantly, the safety and the experiences that we desire for our families.
In a similar vein, we prioritize the HCP and patient experiences in the forefront...
While keeping the brand's strategy intact to thoughtfully design elements framework.
Approach included...
Conducting extensive research on end user needs, website audits, applying design principles...
Usability analysis, heuristic analysis, and so forth.
Two, we collaborated with external partners to conduct end user studies to uncover their experiences that matter most for HCPs and patients.
And third, we designed an approach that would help us organize and deliver the brand content, be it promotional, non-promotional, medical or therapy area in a way that it could adhere to the market regulations at a global scale.
Once a location has been identified, next step is designing and laying a strong foundation to support the construction of a steel structure, the walls, the pillars, the roof, and the entire foundation that sits on the foundation.
In a similar fashion, the foundation of elements has been thoughtfully provisioned by designing using atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages as a core building blocks meticulously aligned design standards and user experience principles with the detailed design specifications that agencies can follow.
To construct the house, selecting durable-- Sorry.
From a development standpoint, we use atom-- Sorry, components, templates, and pages using the Adobe Experience Manager platform.
From a data enablement standpoint, we used the AEM Forms and so forth.
To construct a house, selecting durable and reliable raw materials such as cement, steel, wood, pipes, and wires are essential.
Similarly, we picked industry-leading trusted platforms to bring elements to life.
User experience, design and definition, tools such as Supernova, Figma, and XD were used from a design and creative perspective. Component development was completed using AEM Sites, leveraging experience fragments, content fragments, and so forth.
And data enablement through AEM Forms for data capture, Adobe Analytics for tagging, and use Launch as well.
Media management using Dynamic Media for video hosting and streaming. And finally, the entire operations management was handled through Accenture SynOps platform, which is based on Workfront. And we also use Azure DevOps from an agile management standpoint.
Once a construction is completed before moving into a house, it is essential to furnish and organize the resources such as furniture, appliances, and including setting up rules with dos and don'ts into the house. On the same lines, once the Elements was established, well, Elements was built, establishing a strong governance was essential...
To operate. This included...
Establishing a unified global demand intake process with structured end-to-end operating model, right? Our brand manager's request for website production, the time it goes to production live, and the operation support.
We also established a centralized governance of all demands that introduce a change to the elements framework managed through a change advisory board.
In addition, there's a robust platform governance facilitate extensive use of the existing confidence that we've already built, and also providing guidance to enable and mature the platform capabilities just using Forms, Dynamic Media, accessibility standards, and so forth.
And finally, we also established an ongoing measurement and reporting of KPIs. Examples include the request for design changes that are coming in, growth in the competent variations that we have working on, and the number of net new components that we are building to meet all of the broader demands that are coming in by quarter and so forth.
Now that the house is furnished and ready to move in...
Transition to a new place really requires significant adjustment, such as adapting to the new spaces or using advanced AOT-enabled devices, security systems, and so forth. So...
All of these require an open mindset and learning.
So following are some of the key tactics we used with the change introducing elements within our organization.
One, educating stakeholders with roadshows, demonstrate the power and benefits of elements, brands, agencies using eBooks, videos, lunch and learn sessions, and so forth.
We also had to onboard agencies, and that was the most important and crucial part. And it involved positioning elements as a design tool to shift their focus from design to content.
And we also established an ongoing cadence with all of these agencies that we work with to help create a continuous stream of feedback that could come and that can help refine our elements framework that we have built.
Another critical tactic that we deployed was establishing ways of working with global teams. That involved a very strong cross-functional team collaboration to manage the demand intake coming from each of the affiliate markets and see how that can be triaged working with the different agencies, collaborating with the different technical stakeholders or teams, and also working with some of our experienced partners, the regulatory teams, medical, legal teams, and so forth...
That helped provide a complete visibility of demand through final fulfillment and end-to-end operations was managed successfully.
As you can imagine, this change was not easy.
It required extensive time commitment, take hold alignment, change in mindset that resulted in a sustained success for us.
And we talked about global-- I mean, I think we heard on the Keynote on the Global 4 Local Success. Our Global 4 Local vision truly empowered us to scale operations by co-creating a strategy that facilitate a unified global brand voice with differentiated messaging across markets, including the brand tone, messaging, and clear guidelines.
We established operational planning that defined roles and responsibilities between global and local teams on deliverables and accountability at the center and operational efficiency.
We also leverage extensive reuse of content and repurposed global content for local adaptation translation that accelerated our time-to-market.
Nicolas will be covering some of the outcomes, but with the Global 4 Local, we were able to launch around 30 sites for global market and 6 months across several different campaigns.
In summary, following are the key takeaways, at least on the execution part. One, prioritize HCP & patient experiences at the forefront.
Lay a strong foundation on the design framework and early engagement of brand and agency...
To educate and also get the continuous feedback so that you can refine the design system itself. Select the tools, reliable tools and platforms to enable the framework. And finally, establish a strong governance, an extensive focus on change management.
I'll hand it over to Nicolas to talk about the outcomes. Thank you, Madan. You can just put up my notes up for now.
Well, now that we cover strategic shift and the implementation, let's explore some tangible results and the lessons learned.
Let's just start with the cost saving. As you can imagine it, moving from this no centralized to a centralized change eliminates a lot of extensive work that this agents was doing before. Think about instead of multiple vendors, you have one creative team that handles the campaign while a centralized in-house or a partner team like Accenture and is the local design across that markets. If you think about that Asians usually charge like $100,000 for web project. Now you multiply that to 20. But when you centralize it, you just need to do once, then you spend like a fraction of this cost with the outer reachings to do the designs. Also, the development cost out drops significantly. It's actually the 90% cost reduction is around what you can get on that. 'Cause imagine that before, let's say, you have like 20 websites going on. You have to do 20 times the menu, the buttons, all of the elements that you have in the website but with design system we are going to do that once. All of the other managing websites that you are going to do after this one, you don't need to code anymore. You just have like an outer reaching, that we have a centralized for Accenture or you have your own marketeers like we saw before with GenAI and other tools altering this content and delivering it. The other cost reduction that you have, as I mentioned before, is on the platforms.
We centralized everything through Adobe. It means that we manage one platform only. We have one team that maintain this platform that have knowledge on this platform. We don't need to have like multiple teams that knows multiple platforms, that knows multiple hosters, that needs to talk to multiple vendors just to make each website live in each country. It's all centralized.
The next one is about team efficiency. Because you are like reducing the process, you have a lot of efficiency. You don't have any more like multiple agencies working with all the teams, doing the same work.
The third point-- Actually, the fourth point is the consistent that we have. With a unified framework, users accessing our digital channels instantly recognize familiar partners. Make it easy for them to find information. The manner will be always the same. They will know how to find information if they go to website A, website B, website C. And let's be honest, how often have agents introduced a trendy but in practical design like endless parallax scrolling, right? While it's impressive at first, they can become frustrating for us to maintain for our users when they access our websites. We should always prioritize functionality and consistence over gimmicks. Ensuring a predictable, seamless and enjoyable user experience.
One of the biggest yet underrated transformation is how things can focus now on the content. Agents used to spend a lot of time like just thinking if the logo would be in the left, if the logo would be in the right in this website trying to make the menu like a burger menu, or long menu, or left menu. Now they just focus on the content. All of the set of rules where the menu should be, how the footer should be, how the content will be, how the hero will be, all of the options that they have in the heroes is all done. They don't need to spend time doing the same process over and over. That make us saving their process, make us spend more money for them to create impactful content for our customers. Okay? Another major challenge is the lack of centralizing content performance insights for global brands. If you think about, you have like a multiple websites across multiple markets and each country or each agents was using their own platform including different analytics. Tagging their content in different ways was not a standardized way. When you centralize all of that, you have one unique tool whenever account can make all of their data inside it and the global brands can look at the data more holistically, see the trends, improve their content based on feedback and so on.
To finalize, let's talk about the governance and compliance.
Sorry.
Implement our global design system is a transformational journey. And like any major initiatives come with challenge. Along the way we get there-- Sorry, I was-- One moment.
Let me talk about the governance compliance. Again, sorry. When we have all of these guidelines, it means that you can align all the needs of the markets and understand the nuances. I mean that when we have a design system and we need to variate our content across different plan. We ensure everything's compliant. When we create the nuances for one specific account and we need to replicate multiple websites in that specific account for multiple brands. We know already the rules and we know that that content will be displayed in a compliant way. It also help us eventually with like the security. We know that we need to maintain one system and it will be secured.
As we saw, implement a global design system is a transformational journey. And like any major initiative, it comes with a lot of challenges. Along the way, we gather valuable insights that shape our approach, and I hope these lessons can serve as a guidance for others looking to escape efficient.
The first one is securing leadership buy-in early.
Let's be honest. Getting leadership support now is easy. And in the early days, traction can be slow without it. Once leadership sees the potential impact, they can become our biggest advocates. If the buying doesn't have happen in the beginning, it starts small. Build a MVP, a POC, and use measurable results to demonstrate volume.
One common misconception-- Sorry.
I'll come to another. We talked before how successful design system is just about the design. It requires tight collaboration across business content, UX, and design system. Alignment must happen early because retrofitting the system can lead to inefficiencies and rework.
A tip here is, marketing teams should ensure the agencies design with the system in mind instead of design in their own way and then adapt late in the process. Trust me, it will avoid a lot of frustrations. Because usually the marketeers will have something already in their mind because they saw the initial work for the agents, and then when they try to retrofit, we will not look what they saw first and then everyone gets frustrated with that.
One common misconception is that the design system force rigid uniform templates. A successful one, balancing consistence with creative freedom. Different brands have unique advantages. Some prefer round corners, other prefer sharp edges. Some need specific typography, some need like a specific set of colors. The goal is global alignment allowing room for them to be their unique selves to maintain their identity. The flexibility encourages adoption rather than resistance. As much as you can give them, flexibility should be them, it will easy for them to adapt and accept it. Okay? We talked before but a design system is never static. It involves based on user needs. Continuous feedback from design agents and stakeholders help drive meaningful updates. We have a great example in our case where we have multiple agents feeding back us about our caller system. Our caller system was not so easy to implement and was a little bit limited when we start with the MVP relate to the number of caller tokens that we have. Based on their feedback, we did a huge work with our technical team, our design support team to almost multiply by three times the number of caller options they have and to update how they set up the caller, making it easy. But essentially this regular engagement ensures that the system remains useful, is scalable, and is widely adopted. When they see friction, they get back to the adoption. When you listen then, you bring it, make it easy for them, they will adopt it a little bit easily. Adoption always also depends on accessibility and ease of use. To empower teams, we launch a detailed training materials including step by step videos or introduction videos like the ones that you see before. Every component in our design system is documented with real use cases. 'Cause think about, when the agents is going to build and it's the first time that they look the design system. When they see the hero component for example, they really want to know how that hero will be applying the page. How is the variations that they can have, what they can see. You should always try to bring some real examples for them to really understand, feel comfortable to use it.
They eases the systems to use the faster the team will adopt that integrating their workflows.
To finalize the last one, test before you scale. Pilot before full roll out. A controlled pilot helps catch gaps early. Refine the process and ensure a smooth transition. Getting reward feedback before scaling, prevent costly rework and ensure maximal effectiveness. It's really important for you to look all of the variations before you start scaling. 'Cause when you do your MVP and you start to think, "Okay, if I have to multiply that three times or if I have to customize this, what is the impact of that? How much I will need to do work here?" And then make you easy to prevent that.
Now I'll hand over to Prateek that will tell you a little bit about what we think about the future of that. Thank you, Nicolas. So what we have seen so far is how the design system was created. Madan spoke about the overall execution, and Nicolas spoke about the impact. But we are actually in the world where technology is continuously changing. In the last one or two days, you would have seen various different discussions around generative AI and overall AI, how it is shaping the overall landscape. So we are also continuously working on elevating the elements framework and taking AI, as well as GenAI into the scheme of things to elevate it further. For example, the first part is taking master content and creating different variations of the content. That becomes a very important thing, right? Because it is allowing you to automate a lot of that work as we go ahead. You can have one master content apply engines like Firefly Services and create different variation of the content. You can create different language variations, different resizing of content and so on. So that is something where we can definitely automate a lot of the work. Obviously, there is a human in the loop required for doing the reviews, MLR processes, and all will still be required. But a significant portion of the work can be automated with that. And that's something which we plan to work on. The second part is on the AEM side, right? Madan spoke about we heavily use AEM components, AEM templates in order-- So we get the different designs from atoms, molecules, and organisms, and that get converted into the AEM components. But the creation of AEM components itself can be automated with generative AI. So that is something which we have already worked on in Accenture and something which would be applied as we go ahead into the entire design system where you can create the AEM components in more automated way and then obviously bring the review cycles as required. The third part is the content authoring itself. The authoring, which is done by the operations team, which again, Madan was speaking about, it's an very integral part of this, right? So a lot of the work is there in authoring of the pages, but there also with generative AI, we can actually automate the overall authoring process. And obviously, after the authoring is done through AI by using the AEM components, as well as the GenAI portion of creating the actual content that can be then reviewed further and activated as well to publish the AEM pages. And again, accessibility is a very important part, right? So this typically has been a very manual exercise. Now with generative AI, we have already created solutions where we can find accessibility hotspots in the content. And we can then use AI to even refine the hotspot. So basically, not just you are identifying which areas of the content are not accessibility compliant, but then further on modifying that. And again, after that, there is a human in the loop so that you can do the overall validation and the legal reviews. After that only, that content can move forward. So these are just a few of the examples in which AI, as well as automation can continue to further elevate the entire elements journey as we go ahead in future.
So last, I just wanted to summarize everything which we have discussed in the last 30, 40 minutes. The first is the importance of the global design system. Nicolas spoke about the challenges, the strategic shift rate, how this has actually helped to reduce the cost, improve the overall efficiency, productivity, and importantly, standardization. Because of the reuse and the standardization, the fragmentation and the silos have got broken, and you have one unified process. The second is on the structured governance model, the processes which Madan spoke about, right? It's very important that it is not just a technology solution. The processes and the governance are the gel which actually binds everything together. And then the flexibility and standardization being the key to scaling it. Adoption becoming a very, very important part. And Nicolas spoke about the requirement of getting leadership support, how to get the entire adoption into the frame, right? So in order to have the framework live elements to succeed. And lastly, the continuous iteration and feedback. Again, that is something which is very much required to keep on evolving the system and keep it future ready. So that as the technology is changing, the processes and the governance also change along with that, and we can keep on elevating the system as we go ahead. So these are few of the points. Hopefully, this has helped you in understanding how the elements global design system has actually helped to reshape Astellas' journey. But also it can be applied probably to many of the other use cases in different brands and organizations. So with that, thanks from our-- [Music]
