Alterian Content Manager was chosen by AstraZeneca, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, as the sole platform of choice for its global Web Content Management (WCM) system, in one of the largest content management projects ever undertaken.
Content Manager was short-listed along with four other competitors after a lengthy pre-qualification process. The tender involved working closely with AstraZeneca to produce a 300 point 'proof of concept' as well as succesfully delivering a pilot project that built a handful of websites to demonstrate the functional and usability benefits of the software. Content Manager replaced two existing bespoke WCM systems and a handful of agency based WCM systems as part of the firm's global e-service integration (ESI) strategy.
Kay Wesley, Global Director - emarketing AstraZeneca said "Alterian Content Manager offered the best total solution by meeting our key business criteria and new business innvoation requirements in a way that some more established Enterprise Content Management systems players could not. By combining a genuine focus on empowering the business user with intuitive features such as Instant Site, Content Manager will help AstraZeneca maintain our industry lead in the online arena."
The depth of the project is significant. AstraZeneca have over 250 content managed sites worldwide, which are a mixture of corporate and country sites, product and therapy sites, community initiatives and charitable causes, with varying numbers of authors and levels of traffic. The ESI programme is a complete integration led by sales and marketing, and wholly supported by IS. An integral part of this project was giving AstraZeneca’s e-Marketers and business users control of the websites that they managed and were measured on.
Alterian Content Manager will enable AstraZeneca's eMarketing team to create a de-centralized editorial community that delivers:
- A friendly, easy to use WCM system designed from the e-marketers' perspective which empowers the user community to create and manage their websites
- A very powerful multi stage workflow management
- Wide support for foreign languages including Chinese and Japanese from both a content presentation and an editorial contribution perspective
- A flexible and scaleable approach to handle a wide variety of rich content including movies, PDFs and flash content
- A flexible modern architecture based on common standards
- The ability to support thousands of editors
Other key features of Alterian Content Manager were the ability to provide 24/7 global support, locally to the European, Asian, Australian and American regions and the ability to integrate into AstraZeneca's larger Global Sales and Marketing Information Systems initiative including integration with AstraZeneca's Siebel CRM solution.
Kay closes by commenting that "Alterian Content Manager has enabled us to complete our program of rationalization, bringing together our previous disparate system under one, global technology that will enable seamless online relationships and a better experience for our customers and stakeholders. We will gain associated benefits from a cost, control and consolidation perspective and created a new global standard for our websites".