Newell Rubbermaid

Newell Rubbermaid Expects to Save $1.5 Million Managing Brand Web Sites Over Two Years

Newell Rubbermaid wanted a common and cost-effective way to manage its more than 30 brand Web sites, while giving each of those sites the distinctive look and function that the brand required. Newell Rubbermaid turned to digital agency LBi Atlanta to replace open source and other technology with Microsoft®-based technology. The company expects to save U.S.$1.5 million in fees, capital depreciation, and other costs for content updates and platform maintenance over two years.

Business Needs

They would seem to have little in common, apart from being among the most recognizable brand names in the world: Rubbermaid, Sharpie, Graco, Calphalon, Dymo, Goody, Lenox Industrial Tools, and Paper Mate. Yet they, and more than two dozen others, are all part of Newell Rubbermaid, the U.S.$6.5 billion consumer and commercial products company.

Despite belonging to one company, these well-known brands didn’t share a consistent technology strategy for success on the Internet. Newell Rubbermaid maintained separate Web sites for each, using a combination of commercial and open source technologies—and the company wasn’t achieving economies of scale.

“We determined that neither of our corporate managed legacy Web site platforms nor the various other platforms being used by our brands were meeting our needs,” says Bert Dumars, Vice President of E-Business and Interactive Marketing for Newell Rubbermaid. “They required too much work to maintain, and we had a lean IT staff. When we needed updates or simple content changes, we had to go through agencies—an expensive and time-consuming process.”

At the same time, according to Alex Alexandrou, Director of E-Business Global Information Technology, the technology behind the brand sites forced them into common templates that made their appearances too similar. To address these issues and others, such as integration with the company’s SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, Newell Rubbermaid sought to manage its more than 30 Web sites in a consistent and cost-effective way, yet allow each site to be designed and function as distinctively as possible.

Solution

For its new Internet platform, Newell Rubbermaid considered but rejected an open source solution based on Linux technology. “We determined that Linux wasn’t going to take us where we wanted to be,” says Dumars.

We could adopt Microsoft technology for our Web sites and know that our solution would be cost-effective … would be easy to manage … and would integrate with what we already had. Bert Dumars Vice President, E-Business and Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid

On the other hand, Newell Rubbermaid was comfortable with the Microsoft® technology it already had in place. So, it chose to base its new content management and Internet strategy on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 and Microsoft Commerce Server 2007, and to use Microsoft BizTalk® Server 2006 R2 to integrate the e commerce functions of its new Web sites with its SAP enterprise resource planning system. The company began implementing the strategy with a new site for its Graco baby products brand, and turned to digital agency LBi Atlanta for design, user experience, and technical implementation. Gracobaby.com went live in December 2008, and the other new sites are expected to follow it onto the Microsoft platform through 2011.

For the Graco site, the agency created an innovative, interactive carousel of images that presents the breadth of the brand while allowing site visitors to click an image to go directly to the product or category in which they’re interested. Newell Rubbermaid and LBi Atlanta used Office SharePoint Server 2007 features such as master pages and cascading style sheets to easily create consistent-looking pages for Graco, and is doing the same for each of its other brand sites while keeping the look of each site highly distinctive from the others. Additional SharePoint Server 2007 features, such as a configurable workflow, automate and speed the process of approving new or updated site content.

Newell Rubbermaid is taking advantage of capabilities in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to set up blogs, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, and MySites—to infuse its sites with social media features, as well. MySites, for example, is the foundation for “MyGraco” personalized pages that visitors can use to make and share product wish lists, receive news related to the products they already own, and customize their page views.

Newell Rubbermaid and LBi Atlanta are collaborating on many of the company’s brand sites including Rubbermaid, DYMO, Goody, Solano International, Calphalon, and the next-generation Graco Baby, which all launch in the fall and winter of 2009–2010.

Benefits

Newell Rubbermaid wanted a content management solution for its brand sites that would be easy and cost-effective to maintain. Dumars says the company is achieving that with Microsoft technology, in part because of its experience in using that technology for its server environment. “We could adopt Microsoft technology for our Web sites and know that our solution would be cost-effective; that it would be easy to manage; that it would integrate with what we already had; that it would be solid, secure, and reliable; and that there would be a product road map stretching years into the future,” he says.

Because brand managers can implement content updates on their own, without the need for help from outside agencies, updates that previously took days can now be implemented within hours—and new features implemented on one site are easily deployed to other sites. That means managers can respond more quickly to new consumer needs, boosting the company’s competitive advantage. It also means big savings. When the new Web sites are fully rolled out across the company’s brands, the savings in maintenance fees is expected to reach $1.5 million over two years, according to Dumars.

Integration with SAP is another key benefit of using Microsoft technologies for the brand Web sites. “Our Web sites don’t exist in a vacuum,” says Alexandrou. “Conducting e-commerce means integrating the e commerce front end with credit verification, inventory data, and distribution functions that are handled by SAP. On our new sites, this integration is seamless—another win-win for us and our customers. Because e-commerce is now easier for us to do, we expect to do more.”

One of the most exciting new directions enabled by the move to Microsoft-based Web sites is the increase in social interaction among customers and between customers and the company. “Now, with the introduction of social media tools, we can orchestrate the conversation with our consumers and guide them to find and purchase our products,” says Dumars.