Siemens is Unifying its Varied Aims into a Single Content Solution

For an enterprise like Siemens, maintaining control over content can be a complex process.  

Yet for one of its business units, Siemens Digital Industry Software, based out of Munich and has a workforce of around 14,000, it knows how to enhance its processes with automation technologies. 

As they’re expected to constantly seek new ways of elevating productivity using the latest technology, their teams recently reached out for a headless content solution that is API-first. 

Their solution of choice was Contentful. 

With Contentful, it helped them streamline internal processes and boost project management, lead generation, and marketing campaigns. 

Centralized CMS 

The phases of planning and strategy can be intense at times. They involve plenty of continuous meetings, careful consideration of tools and platforms, and clear documentation and communication. 

The company had previously experimented with project management tools to quicken the content creation process. Yet the company soon thought that they didn’t only want a one-trick tool but a platform that held multiple tools. 

With Contentful, Siemens’ developers can take advantage of the platform’s content models to build templates for curated project details and presentations. They can also take joy in knowing that the setup for the platform’s open-source library is straightforward and clear.

“We didn’t have to fire up an entire development team to create a schema, a database, and an API,” said Keith Childers, chief architect of digital platforms at Siemens. “Contentful offered that all out of the box, allowing us to build our app in just two days.” 

Siemens, like many big brands, likes to create landing pages to build and foster customer relationships as well as collect data.  

In the past, Siemens developers were not very keen on the time it would take to build these and manage them with legacy content management systems. 

Previously, it had taken them weeks to launch a landing page, with difficulties in integrating data analytics and tracking tools taking up plenty of time. 

That’s why Contentful was an easy choice to make. “It’s intuitive and painless compared to other CMS offerings, which really allows our content authors to hit the ground running with little onboarding,” said Joseph Edge, senior cloud app developer at Siemens. 

Using the headless CMS, the organization can unify digital content and customer data to build relevant omnichannel delivery. And the time it takes to launch landing pages today is just a fraction of what it took before. In fact, it takes minutes, with edits taking seconds. 

Marketing  

The content production team consists of writers and editors who are in charge of digital content and editing. 

What is normal for this team is the large workloads and complex processes that involve things such as support tickets and dev requests. 

Contentful’s position in the modern tech stack of Siemens also makes it an ideal platform for non-technical workers, with its easy and intuitive interface.

To ensure that productivity increases while brand consistency is strengthened, the Siemens teams rely on the content governance and workflows of Contentful. It allows them to add new users and define their roles quickly. 

With Contentful’s tags, content and optimization teams can go beyond individual roles to set editing capabilities on a page-to-page basis. After setting up the governance, the Siemens teams were quick to see improvements. 

“Before introducing self-service practices and training, my team addressed over 500 web helpdesk tickets each quarter,” added Annie Mullen, digital marketing coordinator at Siemens. 

And this number is now much lower despite adding multiple new webpages across Siemens’s website. Meanwhile, Annie and her tightknit team didn’t need to expand their responsibilities to manage these additions. 

Moving forward with its usage of Contentful, Siemens is testing the waters for migrating the entire Siemens website to Contentful.

PS: ArganoUV is one of the world’s leading Contentful integrators. Contact us to see how we can work together.