25 January 2010

Kraft Foods needed to give its brand groups greater speed and flexibility in connecting with consumers online. The company chose Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a new global standard for Web content management and is now running its three largest Web sites on its new solution, with plans to migrate all consumer-facing Web sites by the end of 2010.

For more than 100 years, Kraft has offered food that fit the way consumers live. It is the world’s second largest food company with annual revenues of $42 billion. The company employs 98,000 people and manufactures products at 168 manufacturing and processing facilities worldwide.

To support its global leadership position, Kraft maintains approximately 270 consumer-facing Web sites. With the development of most Web sites driven by Kraft brand groups and their creative agencies, the sites were developed using a mix of different platforms, including the Windows operating system from Microsoft and open source software. They had varying content management capabilities; some sites used Microsoft Content Management Server 2002, others used an internally developed content management system, and many didn’t have any content management capabilities at all.

Such a broad range of solutions left Kraft at a disadvantage in meeting its digital marketing needs. Different platforms and content management systems made it hard to reuse what was developed for one site on another, increasing overall software development costs. Limited content management capabilities made it difficult to build new sites or update existing sites, thereby increasing the fees paid to creative agencies. With so many different solutions, support costs were higher as well. One of the largest problems was the time it took to bring new content online and in front of consumer eyeballs.

“Internal customers wanted greater speed and flexibility in connecting with consumers on the Web,” says Karen Chisholm, senior director of service delivery. “So we decided to standardise on a single Web solution, with rich built-in content management tools that would enable brand groups across the globe to be faster and more agile. Our vision was a fast, flexible, and cost-efficient global Web solution that supports all our business needs, enabling us to deliver the services needed by Kraft brand groups and their creative agencies anytime and anywhere.”

Kraft implemented Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as its new strategic standard for Web content management, and is already running its largest Web sites on the new solution. The company plans to move all of its Web sites to Office SharePoint Server 2007 by the end of 2010, giving Kraft a new global standard that will make its brand groups faster and more agile in their digital marketing efforts while reducing both IT costs and creative agency fees.

Our business case for deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 projects $2.2 million in savings over two years and that’s for only the three major sites that we’ve converted so far

Rose Moda, Kraft Foods  “Our corporate technology roadmap calls for the use of Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a global standard for Internet sites and for good reason,” says Chisholm. “Office SharePoint Server 2007 not only meets our needs for Web content management, but also provides a wealth of features that will help us engage with consumers in new ways.”

Kraft initially adopted Office SharePoint Server 2007 as a collaboration solution on the company’s intranet. The company then deployed Office SharePoint Server 2007 Enterprise Search for its Internet sites. Kraft then made the decision to use Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Web content management after determining that the same software could meet its content management needs.

“Our goal was to find a solution from an existing strategic technology partner, and choosing Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Web content management enabled us to simply expand our use of a solution that we already had in-house,” says Chisholm. “What’s more, because the custom features that we had developed on top of Commerce Server 2002 and Content Management Server 2002 were based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, we knew that we could reuse that code with Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

“We converted existing controls that we had built to SharePoint Web Parts and updated them to .NET Framework 2.0, validating both the quality of our vendors and the fact that we could get a site up and running quickly with Office SharePoint Server 2007,” says Chisholm.

To assist with implementation, Kraft enlisted the aid of Blackwell Consulting Services, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. During the effort, developers migrated the custom content management framework that Kraft had developed on top of Content Management Server 2002 to Office SharePoint Server 2007. “We built more than one hundred SharePoint Web Parts that can be used to make sites ‘come alive,’ enabling a Web site designer to drag-and-drop functionality and content onto a page,” says Rose Moda, associate director and global digital marketing Lead at Kraft. “We also implemented a flexible site template model that enables users to create new Web sites without any backend development efforts or tools. Today, our brands and creative agencies can build and launch new Web sites using only a Web browser.”

By mid-2008, Kraft had completed development and began to migrate its three largest Web sites in the US to the new solution. By September 2008, kraftfoods.com, comidakraft.com, and kraftcanada.com all were live on Office SharePoint Server 2007.

With migration of its three largest Web sites to Office SharePoint Server 2007 now complete, and with the sites performing well, Kraft is migrating other sites to the new solution. The company moved its corporate Web site to Office SharePoint Server 2007 in June 2009, and is now in the midst of a request-for-proposal to move all remaining consumer-facing Web sites worldwide to Office SharePoint Server 2007 by the end of 2010.

Kraft also is harmonising its e-commerce sites onto a single platform. Gevalia.com, the company’s first e-commerce site to run on Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007, went live in July 2009 and is one of the first major Web sites to run both products under a single instance and architecture. Kraft worked with Razorfish for Web site design and Blackwell Consulting for Office SharePoint Server 2007 integration and development.

“The combination of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Commerce Server 2007 gives us the technology footprint we need to expand and grow our e-commerce sites and businesses,” says Eddin Alvarado, associate director and lead of global B2C e-commerce systems.

Through its decision to use Office SharePoint Server 2007, Kraft is benefiting from streamlined Web content publishing, making it fast and easy for the company’s brands to update content and roll out new Web sites without the need for IT involvement. The solution provides rich built-in functionality that enables Kraft to support new ways of connecting with consumers online, such as social marketing, and is delivering the enterprise-class performance, scalability, and reliability needed to support the company’s largest Web sites. The solution’s rich capabilities and ease of management are expected to save Kraft $2.2million over the next two years in agency fees, support costs, and development costs.

Kraft is benefiting from superior speed and agility in its digital marketing efforts through simplified Web content publishing. The company’s brand groups can easily create new Web sites, author and manage Web content and functionality, and have full control over approval workflows and when new content goes live. “We launched kraftcanada.com on Office SharePoint Server 2007 in June 2008, comidakraft.com a month later, and kraftfoods.com two months after that,” says Moda. “More recently, in June 2009, we launched our corporate site live on Office SharePoint Server 2007. The reason we’re able to design and deploy sites so quickly is because of the custom content publishing framework we’ve built on top of Office SharePoint Server 2007.”

The company was also able to easily customise and extend Office SharePoint Server 2007 to meet the company’s unique business needs, including the development of hundreds of reusable SharePoint Web Parts that make it easy for brand groups to populate Web pages with navigation aids, community features, polls, product data, recipes, registration forms, videos, and more. Furthermore, the company’s choice of Office SharePoint Server 2007 gives Kraft access to a wealth of other functionality outside of the areas of search and content management, including built-in support for portals, collaboration, business intelligence and business processes.

“With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have a framework to build anything we want- without having to reinvent the wheel,” says Chisholm. “Right now, we’re only taking advantage of about 20 per cent of its functionality.”

The new solution gives Kraft the performance and scalability needed to cost-effectively support several high-traffic Web sites. Kraftfoods.com, comidakraft.com, kraftcanada.com, and the corporate site are hosted on only three Web servers, which run at roughly 75 per cent capacity. Gevalia.com, which receives about 25 million page views per month, runs on the other two servers. As more sites are added, the company can scale its solution to support a growing workload by deploying additional cost-effective, industry-standard servers.

Kraft’s move toward a single, enterprise-wide Web content management platform will reduce costs in several ways, including lower IT and creative agency costs. “Our business case for deploying Office SharePoint Server 2007 projects $2.2 million in savings over two years and that’s for only the three major sites that we’ve converted so far,” says Moda.

“Of those savings, we expect to see a $1.4 million reduction in creative agency fees through simplified content management, as calculated based on a 25 per cent reduction in the agency hours required for such work. We also expect to realise a reduction in ongoing support costs. Finally, we can expect to reduce our development costs by 60 per cent per year as a result of utilising a single code base across all Web sites. As more sites are converted to Office SharePoint Server 2007, we’re seeing a very strong return on investment. A good example of this is the recent launch of the Gevalia.com Web site on the same platform.”

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