Magnolia gives Essentra the flexibility to customize digital experiences
For over 65 years, Essentra’s small but essential components and hassle-free end-to-end service have been making life easier for its customers by solving project needs for a range of applications and industries, such as equipment manufacturing, automotive, fabrication, electronics and construction.
Prior to deploying Magnolia, Essentra was using a monolithic enterprise software platform that was unable to meet the ever-changing needs of the business. Having acquired a number of companies over the last decade, Essentra needed to integrate these brands into its existing digital ecosystem. But due to the complexities of running each website independently, at Essentra it was important to maintain a unified user experience.
To keep up with the growing needs of the business, Essentra developed a clear digital strategy. But the CMS they were using wasn’t able to meet these needs. As such, a flexible, more modular system was required that would allow the brand to adapt its web assets in real-time as the business evolved.
With the old system, Essentra couldn’t quickly launch new digital capabilities. This, combined with a lack of integration for other modern marketing tools, made rolling out effective digital projects an extremely time-consuming task.
Essentra required a CMS that is more flexible to keep up with the ever-changing marketplace. Essentra decided to invest in a system that would provide greater integration, real-time customization and improved flexibility. Making the switch to Magnolia, Essentra recognized a number of benefits:
Simple integration with other systems
Essentra needed a platform that could integrate easily into its existing e-commerce platform. Even though Magnolia is sold as a stand-alone product, Essentra was able to seamlessly integrate with the company’s existing systems and ecommerce platform.
For example, the company’s e-commerce system provided product inventory and customer data, which then blended into Magnolia’s extendable framework, which included headers, footers and static pages, as well as URL management. Through this seamless integration, product content can still be derived from the e-commerce platform, while everything else is provided by Magnolia.
As a result, Essentra can now benefit from Magnolia’s first-class CMS, without having to compromise the ecommerce platform capabilities. Magnolia’s CMS has been key in removing the complexity of Essentra’s content management, enabling the business to manage the whole process more efficiently and publish new content easily and quickly. The result is a better digital experience, without having to redevelop and rebuild from the ground up.
Greater flexibility
Modern enterprises need to react quickly to market changes, and Essentra is no exception. Rather than requiring regular input from IT teams, Magnolia’s CMS enables Essentra’s marketing team to create and launch content with ease and at speed.
Additional integrations also allow Essentra to expand the functionality of these assets, while on-premises and cloud deployment options mean that Magnolia is futureproofed for the company’s growing size and evolving needs.
Easy implementation
Lightweight in design, Magnolia allowed Essentra to implement CMS projects with minimum customization. And because it’s java-based, the company’s developers could easily shape it into what they require at any time.
While expert consultants from Magnolia were on hand to provide workshops for proof of concept, Essentra found the software easy to use and quickly became self-sufficient.
Plug and play digital asset management
With Magnolia, Essentra was able to avoid the challenge of asset migration, allowing the company to keep existing processes and workflows in place.
Essentra was also able to simply and quickly plug its Digital Asset Management (DAM) system into Magnolia’s CMS and manage the entire system from one centralized ecosystem—removing the need for marketers and IT teams to be disrupted or forced to learn new procedures. Essentra’s marketing team can now browse and view assets in the Magnolia Content App, as well as edit images, tags and metadata.
The migration to Magnolia has been extremely successful, providing Essentra with a hassle-free integrated approach to content management.
With fewer restrictions imposed by a legacy system, Essentra enjoys greater freedom and flexibility to create and develop content unique to its brand.
Following the successful launch of local language websites in five countries, Essentra has plans to use Magnolia to launch websites in a further 20+ markets. Essentra also plans to adopt some of the other key features that Magnolia has to offer, such as personalization, in the near future.
Part of the Magnolia advisory board, Essentra continues to provide valuable insights towards helping Magnolia to define its customer offering.
When we evaluated Magnolia, they were up against a few other software vendors, but Magnolia’s CMS stood out against the rest because of the ease of use and flexibility it provided to meet our business needs. The initial support we got from Magnolia’s consultants was extremely helpful, but the software is so easy to understand that we’re now completely self-sufficient. It really is a great piece of software!
Basheer Shahul
Architecture Director, Essentra
