Growing a global leader.
Sika builds a scalable ecosystem to maintain consistency during periods of massive growth with Adobe.
25%
More unique visitors and page views in one year
Objectives
Attract more traffic across primary web touchpoints
Scale quickly to support growing Sika brand amidst acquisitions
Accelerate migration of acquired companies to standard Sika systems
Improve consistency across creative assets
Results
25% increase in unique visitors and page views in one year
Supports jump in traffic with cloud service, including a 40% increase in mobile traffic
3x validated assets in digital asset management system using APIs to streamline migration
Automatically update assets using Asset Link between creative apps and the digital asset management system
Driving digital innovation and global growth
When Peter Simon talks about Sika's digitization strategy, his enthusiasm is infectious. As the Head of Application Services at Swiss manufacturer Sika, Simon wants to drive innovation, make the most of the opportunities presented by digital transformation, and continuously improve the customer experience at all touchpoints.
For more than 100 years, Sika has manufactured products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting buildings and industries. Its products can be found in a variety of everyday objects: coffee makers, washing machines, cars, mobile homes, ships, airplanes, wind turbines, solar panels, windows, elevators, and more.
Simon oversees the technical roadmap for Sika products. He currently leads a team of about 30 employees who provide and distribute customer-oriented applications, tools, and platforms to over 100 countries and 33,000 users.
Recently, Sika focused on a strategy of corporate growth through acquisitions. In the last three years, Sika more than doubled its business and the number of employees. The manufacturer acquired between five and seven medium-sized companies during this time, with companies having anywhere from 50 to 8,000 employees.
Given the high volume of acquisitions, Simon and his team can spend from 30% to 40% of their day integrating acquired companies into the existing IT infrastructure. This not only involves migrating software and hardware, but also data, processes, and templates. By aligning structures and standardizing its IT environment, Sika can streamline and automate processes for a future-proof system.
"Adobe enables us to easily integrate new apps as needed so that we can focus on our operational business goals and minimize the administrative burden on our IT team."
Peter Simon
Head of Application Services, Sika
Growth through integration
Sika has been an Adobe customer for 15 years and now has an extensive Adobe ecosystem of diverse applications from Adobe Experience Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud. It started when the company implemented Adobe Experience Manager Sites as the content management system (CMS) for its website. The website is the most frequently used customer touchpoint and first stop into the world of Sika products. Today it has 120,000 pages and more than 40 million unique visitors every year, with traffic increasing by 25% in the past year alone.
The website connects with the digital asset management system (DAM), which Sika moved into the cloud and relaunched on Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service. The content and assets in the DAM power both the customer portal and the B2B online store.
"We place great value on a modular approach that allows us to complete strategically important tasks as they come up," says Simon. "Adobe enables us to easily integrate new apps as needed so we can focus on our operational business goals and minimize the administrative burden on our IT team.”
For a company with a defined growth strategy like Sika, however, it is not only the ability to integrate new modules and applications that matters but also the scalability of the ecosystem. When Sika acquires a new company, Simon and his team can easily migrate existing product images and websites to the DAM using APIs. This easy connection has helped triple the number of validated assets to 150,000 in recent years.
"Standardization, templates, and a global standardized process are incredibly important at such a large company. Particularly with our strong focus on growth, automated solutions represent a huge time savings for our small teams," says Simon.
In the past, websites of newly acquired companies were usually transferred manually. Not only was this manual process difficult to scale, but pages then needed to be localized and adapted to the Sika style, which was a considerable hurdle. The company has now built a content migration tool in the CMS to transfer websites of acquired companies. Web teams simply need the URL for the page to migrate. Sika web authors then look at the structure and content elements and select which parts are still relevant for the Sika website.
"We can log into the Sika CMS on Monday and select the 10 images we want from the website of the company we acquired just a few days earlier,” says Simon. “This saves us a lot of time, effort, and costs that we would rather invest in future acquisitions. While we have a current market share of 11%, that just means there is still 89% growth potential."
One source for all customer touchpoints
Sika supports many other digital touchpoints in addition to the customer website. The company personalizes its email marketing campaigns by segmenting customers according to purchase history or existing invoices to create a 360-degree profile of customers. There’s a B2B online store and customer portal. Customers expect a consistent user experience, with the same product images across all sites. With the DAM hosted in the cloud, Sika can support increasing levels of site traffic with ease, including a 40% increase in traffic from mobile devices.
"The customer should receive consistent data and a consistent user experience, no matter where they are in the digital Sika world," says Simon.
Extending digital content into Adobe Creative Cloud
"Adobe Creative Cloud supports us throughout the entire content supply chain with seamless integrations into the DAM," says Marcus Grunewald, DAM Product Owner & Business Analyst at Sika. Sika uses Creative Cloud to generate content quickly and efficiently.
"Adobe Creative Cloud supports us throughout the entire content supply chain with seamless integrations into the DAM."
Marcus Grunewald
DAM Product Owner & Business Analyst, Sika
An example of this integration is seen in brochures created in Adobe InDesign. Sika designers use the Adobe Asset Link plug-in, which creates a dynamic link between the assets in the DAM and Creative Cloud products. This makes it easy to update assets in InDesign. For instance, if there is a new product image, it can be easily applied to the corresponding InDesign file through a reference link to the DAM.
Sika generates many different types of content through Creative Cloud applications. The content is managed in the DAM and distributed to relevant channels.
Generative AI for the Sika ecosystem
Currently, Sika needs an average of three years to fully integrate a new company. In the future, the company aims to reduce this time considerably with new companies fully migrated after just nine to 12 months. To achieve this goal, Sika will need to automate processes further.
Simon also expects that generative AI with Adobe Firefly will play a role in marketing. The company is currently in the process of extensively testing Firefly for a variety of use cases. For a global player like Sika, experimenting with AI tools comes with great responsibility. With Firefly, Sika can rely on an AI solution trained with licensed public domain content that is safe for commercial use and that fits seamlessly into the existing ecosystem.
"Generative AI like Adobe Firefly is a great addition with the potential to accelerate design speeds and free up more creative capacity, allowing us to manage and control content responsibly," says Simon.
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