Spartan Chemical Company, Inc. (Spartan) has been a recognized leader in the formulation and manufacture of sustainable cleaning and sanitation solutions for the industrial and institutional market since 1956. In addition to their B2B ecommerce distribution network, Spartan also provides custodial management software and employee training programs to fulfill their end-to-end cleaning solutions promise.
When embarking on a website redesign and development project, Spartan chose Optimizely Content Cloud for their CMS, along with an implementation partner with limited Optimizely experience. As their needs and technology stack grew, Spartan was met with constant challenges.
Response times for maintenance and support did not meet their needs; they were unable to integrate systems (i.e., CMS, Insite Software/Optimizely B2B Commerce, and Salsify PIM) and unable to scale the solution to meet the needs of their sales distribution network.
Full-service Optimizely Strategic Partner
Spartan required a strategic partner, someone with a greater breadth and depth of Optimizely experience that could guide them in Optimizely best practices and innovative solutions unique to their needs.
The Spartan Chemical and Adage strategic partnership began with a discovery phase, including technology and code audit. The Adage Team confirmed several issues described by Spartan Chemical management, then quickly identified and executed solutions.
Optimizely B2B Commerce Updates
Spartan can take advantage of the latest features like Epi Forms and approval sequences. Now content editors can easily create and edit forms for increased user feedback. Approval sequences decreased the number of pages with errors due to mandatory approvals before publishing.
WCAG & Accessibility Improvements
Missing H1s, enabling correct keyboard navigation, fixing color contrasts, and modifying different search box labels. These solutions, coupled with updating the site navigation and page tree, provides site visitors with an improved user experience.
Increased CMS Flexibility
Removing hardcoded text from pages and increasing the number of properties with on-page-editing capabilities allows content editors to do much more without the help of a developer.
Adage® Care℠
The Adage DevOps team set up two environments in-house, one for staging and one for development. They use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) in these environments to expedite releases and enables Spartan to complete user acceptance testing (UAT) in the staging environment. With this build process, issues with the code are caught early. The team knows when the change was made, what was introduced, and by whom, to quickly isolate the code bug and fix it.
This deployment method also provides transparency for Spartan. They can see what we are working on in batches and not wait for the full set of features or the next phase in the project to be complete.
Find out more about Adage Care for cloud hosting, managed services, support, and maintenance.
Improved User Experience and Search Results with Optimizely Search & Navigation
It was difficult for visitors to find products and materials via Spartan’s site search. A user would need an exact matching search term and could not sort or filter results. With an Epi Find implementation, Adage took Spartan’s search capabilities from rudimentary to user friendly!
Search based on individual properties.
Products have the potential to be searched by their part code, category code, title, size description, etc.
Autocomplete typical search terms.
Allows users to more easily fill the search bar with terms common to the site.
Declare words as synonyms.
Ensure synonyms return similar results.
Why Adage?
Adage’s 12+ years of Optimizely experience and Optimizely bandwidth allowed for these fast-to-market solutions. Adage is comprised of 85% delivery team members – front-end developers, back-end developers, UX/UI designers, digital strategists, and all are well-versed in Optimizely. Including an in-house Optimizely MVP.
This expertise makes Adage more than an implementation partner; we are a strategic partner that helps guide Spartan through Optimizely’s best practices and realize a higher return on their Optimizely investment.
Before Adage, Spartan was managing multiple service providers and technologies, making it hard for them to scale solutions and plan for the future. This set up also created roadblocks and long implementation timelines. Adage’s forward-thinking team removed barriers for Spartan. The new strategic partnership resulted in a prioritized road map, continued implementation of more Optimizely features, and innovative planning for Spartan’s future.
Optimizely B2B Commerce Integrated Technology
The Spartan Chemical commerce portal for largest North American customers and a Product Information Management (PIM) system to begin effective syndication of their products and move off of separate databases and spreadsheets for product information. Spartan Chemical acquired three separate systems:
- Optimizely CMS for their website;
- Insite Software (Now Optimizely B2B Commerce)
- and Salsify for their PIM.
While effective for their specific purposes, each of the above platforms was supported by different vendor partners with variance in the quality and timeliness of their support and no overarching strategy partner.
Adage is currently assisting in integrating their Salsify PIM to Optimizely CMS, and are planning a redesign of their corporate Sales Enablement Platform.
