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.
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."
