Johnson & Johnson

The Client

Founded in 1886, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) develops medical devices, pharmaceutical, and consumer packaged goods. The company is ranked No. 37 on the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue. The corporation includes 250 subsidiary companies with operations in 60 countries and products sold in over 175 countries. 

The Situation

Johnson & Johnson needed to improve its online presence and offer customers an optimized user experience. Additionally, the company wanted to find a way to easily scale its vast portfolio of product and brand websites. But the previous site’s SEO was lacking, as was consistency and unified features across brands. As a result, users didn’t have easy access to the information they needed, Wanting to minimize ongoing development and support costs and move 500+ high-traffic, international consumer websites to a centralized platform, J&J collaborated with EPAM. 

The Challenge

Working with EPAM, the teams identified a number of digital challenges. Moving more than 500 sites to a new platform in a time- and cost-effective manner — with minimal impact on J&J’s brands — was no easy task. Additionally, sites were being built with very little coordination between site builders and platform maintainers, meaning each new website was running a unique and highly-customized version of the platform—ultimately resulting in limited upstream contributions, and a costly and unique upgrade process for each site owner. Quality assurance presented another massive challenge with, on average, only 30% of defects being caught before new sites went live. 

The Solution

J&J collaborated with EPAM to develop CANVAS, a robust, Drupal-based multisite platform that allows its portfolio of global brand websites to grow and scale as the digital world evolves. With Continuous Integration (CI) tools to automate site configuration management and standardized site build and upgrade processes, the team ensured predictable, coordinated platform releases. Additionally, EPAM developed custom templates to be used for requirements gathering and content migration to streamline the process and implemented building tools that enforce adherence to the universal platform release plan by restricting individual sites from customizing core platform code.

The Results

As a result of the collaboration between J&J and EPAM, key metrics include:

• Average cost for a new site build was reduced by 59%
• Build time for new sites was reduced by 45%
• Per-site ongoing maintenance costs were significantly reduced by 25% or more
• Cost and time-to-market for the deployment of new platform features was reduced
• New and existing sites may access the expanding shared feature set
• Consistency across all sites resulted in an increase in upstream contributions to the core platform, allowing all sites to frequently benefit from efforts made to improve one site
• Average time on site, page views per visit, and percent of visits to target pages all increased