Michael Menna

Global Marketing and Sales IT Lead , DuPont

Supernova Award Category: 

Next-Generation Customer Experience

The Organization: 

DuPont is a global company founded in America in 1802, and over its 200-year history of research and innovation has created some of the world’s most famous products and brands, such as nylon, Kevlar, Corian, Tyvek, and Lycra. In recent years, the company’s organization has changed markedly. In 2017, it merged with Dow Chemical and became the world’s largest chemical company in terms of sales. Subsequently, the company split into three distinct divisions that focused on agriculture (Corteva), materials science (Dow), and specialty products (DuPont), all separately, publicly traded companies. Today’s DuPont is an innovation leader that provides “differentiated products and solutions that transform industries and life,” as the company puts it.

The Problem: 

DuPont wanted to ensure its digital presence reflected its new corporate mandate and brand identify, encapsulated in the tagline “the global science and innovation leader that strives to solve the world’s greatest problems.” The company also wanted to improve the experience – current and future – of users of its massive web site, built using Adobe Experience Manager v5.6 and serving more than 50 countries, with content in more than 30 languages. Creating new consumer experiences was slow and complex, and moving to the latest version of AEM (v 6.2) would make that work easier and provide more insights into audiences and analytics.

The challenge was to launch the new www.dupont.com and facilitate a consistent online presence and brand identity for the company cross 54 domains with minimal invasion to the businesses. Additionally, DuPont wanted to leverage AEM’s advanced capabilities to transform its marketing capabilities and move hosting to the cloud.

The Solution: 

TCS Interactive designed, planned, and executed this massive web platform transformation to Adobe Experience Manager v6.2 and implemented cloud hosting using Microsoft Azure. The new system resulted in a better experience that included major enhancements in the fluidity of content, design, and engagement. The transformation made it much easier to create and author new digital customer experiences and functionality.

Other benefits included:

  • Platform Flexibility: Upgrading from AEM 5.6 to 6.2 led to improved integration capabilities, flexibility and freedom, and platform performance.
  • Analytics: Capturing real-time data and enabling better, more elegant reporting resulted in an enhanced analytics framework. The analytics platform was redeployed using the Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager and Page-Level Data Elements for future scalability.
  • Performance/Optimization: AEM 6.2 provided better flexibility. Improving the overall infrastructure helped cost optimization.
The Results: 

This effort was driven by DuPont’s business goals and desire to transform its web capabilities. Adobe's out-of-the-box capabilities allowed DuPont to introduce dynamic competencies–notably in the realm of audience management and analytics–that previously would have been difficult or impossible to build in-house. Additional results and metrics include:

  • DuPont realized 50% in annual cost savings in terms of total cost of ownership driven by the flexibility of AEM 6.2 and the move to the cloud.
  • Performance metrics for www.dupont.com improved substantially: Page load speed and real-time user monitoring improved by 150%.
  • Project and execution efficiency increased:
    • Time to market for new experiences improved by 66% thanks to AEM’s unified repository framework.
    • Authoring performance improved by 100%.
    • Business project execution success increased by 300% .
  • The implementation featured an integrated digital marketing capability with advanced analytics for real-time personalization and effective KPI measurement.
  • The project entailed the seamless migration of over 6,000 images, 222 videos, and over 5,400 content artifacts from the old to the new platform.

Finally, we implemented this project in an agile, flexible way that improved time-to-market and will help DuPont going forward. DuPont is now benefiting from the overall flexibility improvement and the implementation of AEM best practices.

Metrics: 

Subjectively, the project was a substantial success, but it also generated impressive objective metrics (also detailed above):

  • DuPont realized 50% in annual cost savings in terms of total cost of ownership driven by the flexibility of AEM 6.2 and the move to the cloud.
  • Performance metrics for www.dupont.com improved substantially: Page load speed and real-time user monitoring improved by 150%.
  • Project and execution efficiency increased:
    • Time to market for new experiences improved by 66% thanks to AEM’s unified repository framework.
    • Authoring performance improved by 100%.
    • Business project execution success increased by 300% (3X).
  • The implementation featured an integrated digital marketing capability with advanced analytics for real-time personalization and effective KPI measurement.
  • The project entailed the seamless migration of over 6,000 images, 222 videos, and over 5,400 content artifacts from the old to the new platform.
The Technology: 
  • Integrated with Adobe Target and Adobe Dynamic Tag Manager to capture real-time customer data and generate reporting.
  • Upgraded the entire analytics suite through Adobe Analytics.
  • Adobe Target Search and Promote was used to optimize search results.
  • Clay Tablet was used to make it quicker and more cost-effective than before.
  • The Microsoft Azure Cloud implementation leveraged various offerings from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace to address performance and scalability challenges.
Disruptive Factor: 

1) Complexity and Collaboration:

Due to the magnitude of the project – 58 countries and four different environments – the team faced the massive challenge of updating the old and installing new systems at the same time while ensuring that the site went live with zero downtime. Collaborating with multiple partners, understanding their concerns, and applying those insights to the content migration strategy added to the challenge.

Solution: TCS Interactive customized the strategy to the environment and to the merge-and-spin scenario to meet the stringent timeline.

2) Legacy Platform:

To address the challenges generated by the legacy AEM system, the team adopted a three-solution strategy:

Solution 1: AEM 5.6.1 was upgraded to AEM 6.2, accompanied by substantial platform optimization.

Solution 2: The infrastructure and application capabilities were upgraded to ensure future scalability.

Solution 3: The legacy code was refactored to move into the new text stack and provide a better user experience.

Shining Moment: 

In 2019, we launched a completely transformed and new experience for www.dupont.com corporate website using the latest version of Adobe AEM 6.4 in just four months. This transformation story is captured through a “n:ow at DuPont” campaign using the tag line “Creating a better now” and more details can be found at https://www.dupont.com/now.html.

The revamped website made it to the finals of the prestigious Adobe Experience Maker Awards.

About Your Organization

DuPont (NYSE: DD) is a global innovation leader with technology-based materials, ingredients, and solutions that help transform industries and everyday life. It applies diverse science and expertise to help customers advance their best ideas and deliver essential innovations in key markets including electronics, transportation, construction, water, health and wellness, food and worker safety.