Scaling a connected manufacturer

Sika is a Swiss multinational specialty chemical company headquartered in Baar, Switzerland. Founded in 1910, Sika develops and produces systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing, and protecting in the building and motor vehicle industries.

The company operates in more than 100 countries, employs more than 33,000 people and generates annual revenues of more than 11 billion Swiss francs.

Since 2020, Sika has pursued an ambitious growth strategy to establish itself as the clear market leader. In three years, Sika doubled in size — both in terms of business and number of employees — through multiple acquisitions.

That’s created content silos and generated massive amounts of migration work. Peter Simon, Sika’s Head of EMEA Business IT, says his team can spend hours each day simply integrating acquired companies into Sika’s digital infrastructure. Templates, processes, workflows and data must all get migrated.

We have been helping Sika build an entire ecosystem in Adobe that breaks down content silos, streamlines integration work and accelerates content delivery.

A few years ago, we helped Sika redesign their website and roll out 100-plus localized versions of it. These were built with Adobe Experience Manager Sites.

Next, we helped them implement a new digital asset management platform to streamline and automate migration work. We implemented Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service for that.

By 2024, Sika had a scalable Adobe ecosystem in place. The new DAM was powering the customer portal. Their CMS was helping manage 120,000 pages and 40 million unique visitors annually.

The final step was to migrate that ecosystem to the cloud to unlock all of its benefits. The cloud migration took 90 days and broke down into three phases:

• We set up the cloud environment, deployed code, tested that code locally and then gave Sika access. This phase was completed by Week 6.

• Sika tested the solution and gave us continuous feedback. This phase was completed by Week 10.

• We helped integrate Sika’s partners and migrate content into the new cloud environment. This was completed by Week 13 — right on schedule.

Since we began working together in 2018, Sika and Valtech have found numerous ways to collaborate more closely.

Today, we’re a part of Sika’s organization. Valtech has a dedicated DevOps team that helps the company launch new features and develop new capabilities. That has helped Sika develop modern architectures and modern ways of working.

So, when Sika was ready to migrate their Adobe ecosystem to the cloud, we were ready to deliver. We had helped build the Adobe ecosystem. That gave this project a head start.

Sika knew we were being candid when we said we would have the migration done within three months.

The customer experience in manufacturing can be complex, with a range of actors, a non-linear buying journey and a growing constellation of touchpoints.    

Winning brands deliver a connected experience, one that supports and guides people through personalized touchpoints.

To do that, manufacturing brands need a connected ecosystem, where channels and architectures harmonize to guide customers, generate more value, deliver efficiency and deepen people's understanding of the brand.

This can be a challenge for manufacturers. With their typically complex organizational structures, many manufacturers struggle to rationalize their IT landscape. Their numerous systems and strategies make it difficult to find common ground.

Since 2018, we have helped Sika build a foundation that supports customer interactions across the brand's touchpoints:

• The localized websites we helped launch serve as a crucial interface.

• The CMS we implemented lets Sika manage that interface easily.

• The DAM we implemented accelerates content delivery to Sika’s digital touchpoints.

By building this ecosystem with Adobe solutions and activating it in the cloud, Sika now has a single platform that delivers a consistent brand experience across dozens of digital customer touchpoints.

Valtech is an important piece of our partner landscape, as being a trusted advisor with solid experience in the field of Adobe Experience Manager, demonstrating strong in-house technical capabilities and expertise combined with scalability (up & down), and the necessary partnerships in the global AEM ecosystem.

— Peter Simon, Head of EMEA Business IT, Sika

Manufacturing customers expect consistent experiences from the brands they work with, and Sika’s streamlined, automated content supply chain empowers the brand to meet those expectations.