Grundfos – Transforming to Empower

Baggrund

It all started with one waterpump. That pump turned into a global, pioneering leader, producing more than 16.000.000 pumps a year. That pioneering leader turned into a global sustainability contributor, saving electricity on a global scale with pioneering technologies. How did they get there? Persistent ambitions, a unique will to adapt and never just going with the flow. That very DNA, sent Grundfos on one of the largest and most ambitious digital transformation journeys in Danish history.

“It is our ambition to make the smartest and most intelligently executed digital transformation in any industrial company.”
Mads Nipper, Former CEO, Grundfos

Digital Transformation is a top-down strategy with a bottom-up focus on organizational support and structure. It’s not a project on the side. It’s not part of their strategy. It IS their strategy.

4 lighthouses was originally set up to guide the way, helping Grundfos prioritize their efforts, to leverage the full potential of digitalization and essentially increase efficiency in everything they do.

Direct and relevant relations

Connectivity and optimization

New business models

Digital value chain

As their digital platforms gain increasing importance for their customer relations, being their most important point of contact with their customers by far, they are a central part of this digital transformation journey. Grundfos.com must enable customers to buy complex products with ease, making sure they’re sized and used correctly and finally getting them to the markets where they make that positive change. The website is thereby not only a key sales-enabler, but a key enabler for the vision of a better tomorrow.

When Grundfos built their systems a decade ago, they were ambitious and ahead of their time. Today, however, they had become a massive pain point for the customers' experience.

Together we identified a dire need for a simpler and fully connected user experience, better enabling customers to get their jobs done across any Grundfos touchpoint.
A big part of this meant breaking down silos, technical as well as organizational. With one experience in mind, the ambition was to unite both design and data across all channels – better enabling the customers while also enabling marketing and sales with more data and better opportunities for automated processes. Ultimately, with the end goal of getting more Grundfos pumps, sized and used as prescribed, purchased and distributed across the world.

Løsning

Grundfos' digital presence consists of their Product Center (online search and sizing tools), main website (corporate information and services) and Extranet (online product ordering). Each area was a silo, responsible for interrupted and frustrating customer experiences. As the root cause of the bad customer experience, they had to go. With digital architecture still dependent on various legacy systems, the entire ecosystem had to be redone from scratch, to be able to support the ambition of one seamless experience.

As a transformation of this magnitude has many stakeholders and high ambitions, a new way of working was introduced, to enable greater cooperation and efficiency across technology and people. This enabled dialogues to happen in a more agile way, thus introducing change at a higher pace.

The change to be achieved was to ensure integrations with the legacy platforms, making the solution scale, and achieving better customer experience, by eliminating the previous experience gaps. This also entailed consolidating all data in the same CMS by heavily integrating all platforms allowing master data to be controlled by each of the originating platforms. This enabled content to be recycled more easily and repurposed with true personalization throughout the ecosystem across all touchpoints. A part of this work was measuring and making sure that everything that got measured was actionable and not just insightful.

The updated and hyper customized new digital architecture has paved the way for a multitude of new, more intelligent and automated processes and ways of working for Grundfos, such as:

A new Marketing Automation setup was incorporated, to support both customers and Grundfos’ sales by automatically following up on the quotations being sent. It was also enabled through Adobe Analytics to push the behavioral data from the website to Campaign Standard enabling real-time triggers that weren’t possible before.

A new bespoke PIM implementation has replaced the repetitive tasks of maintaining and creating the more than 800 content pages and 750,000 product pages, across two platforms, providing higher quality and lower costs.

An improved editor experience, that has enabled Grundfos to scale the digital experience, despite differing capabilities and skills across the globe. Editors now enjoy a more user friendly and seamless cooperation including automated translations, while Grundfos maintain control of the quality using Siteimprove. With this setup, Grundfos can now leverage their vast variety of content around the globe, without compromising the quality or adding additional costs.