We have worked with British marketing agencies as their external development department for years. One of them serves customers from the oil & gas industry, where the demand for digital services is constantly growing.

Challenge: 
a new portal for client's distributor network to help grow sales

Our partner's client from the oil & gas industry needed a custom-designed, secure portal to provide their distributor network with access to marketing and sales-enablement materials to help them grow sales. The project involved integrations with other systems and, most importantly, complex high-level security to prevent attack attempts and information leaks and ensure the stability of the entire infrastructure.

Solution: 
leveraging functionalities from the client's existing Kentico website

The client previously used websites built in the Kentico content management system, so we leveraged core functionality from the website to create the portal for distributors. This approach not only drove efficiencies from a development perspective, but also from a content management perspective, as updates to product information happened seamlessly and simultaneously in both the website and portal. That way, we could leverage the same content between the two, thus increasing the efficiency of content managers' work and facilitating the management of the entire online marketing communication of the company. A practical solution like that was possible due to Kentico Xperience DXP functionalities.

Development process

As usual with new projects, we worked with the 5D model. In the Discovery phase, we established that safety would be the project's priority and we determined the required security level. Later on, together with our partner marketing agency, as one team, we designed the look of the portal and UX aspects and took care of the entire backend development.
  

The agency was responsible for the concept's look and the general feel, but the specifics, including UX, the particular mechanisms, and the security of the whole project, were our responsibility from the beginning. Kentico digital experience platform was the leading technology we used, but various custom integrations with Sharepoint and Azure AD B2C and B2B were also required. 

Our team consisted of a project manager who acted as a liaison between us, the partner agency and the end customer, backend, and frontend developers. The project turned out to be more complex than initially expected, due to additional security requirements and integrations requested by the client, so a total of twenty people worked on it as part of the combined team of ADHD Interactive and Emberson Marketing.

Results

Kentico DXP allowed us to build the new portal off the back of the existing customer page, but the result is an entirely new entity. The distributor website is performing to the client's expectations and getting positive feedback from its users. The client is expanding the content and number of partners on the secure portal. 

Thanks to this project, together with our partner agency, we managed to revamp all of the client's digital services. Because they were so impressed with the final product, they've decided to invest more money into the portal to continue developing its architecture and expand its functionalities.