Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks: driving innovation in the automotive industry by delivering the unexpected
About Volvo Trucks North America and Mack Trucks Inc.
A century of innovation
In operation for nearly 100 years today, Volvo is one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers, renowned for their quality, safety, and consideration towards the environment. Both of its subsidiaries, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks, are leading manufacturers that supply trucks to essential industries like construction, refuse, emergency services and haulage.
Living up to the legacy of innovation, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks made the decision to invest in a new customer management system (CMS) as part of Volvo Group’s larger strategy to leverage technology to adapt, deliver, and serve their customers more quickly and effectively. Cognizant Netcentric has been working closely with Volvo Trucks NA and Mack Trucks Inc. over the last months on this ambitious project, leveraging one of Adobe’s newest cloud-native CMS technologies - Adobe Experience Manager’s (AEM) Edge Delivery Services (formerly known as AEM Franklin).
The challenge
Doing the unexpected
Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks recognized they were reaching a crossroad on their digital customer experience journey. With a plethora of content, multiple markets and the need for speed and agility, their legacy system was no longer the right fit for the business and the experiences they wanted to create for their customers. It was time to upgrade their CMS and lift and shift to a new platform, on the cloud, that met today’s highest standards of tech, editing experience and end-user experience. After careful consideration and collection of business requirements, the path forward was clear: Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks needed to do the unexpected to meet their commitment to innovation and customer-centricity.
With four goals of migrating to a state of the art CMS, increasing their speed to market, improving the content editing experience, and achieving stellar SEO performance, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks developed a business case to address these issues head-on. This is what led them to consult with us, Cognizant Netcentric.
Through consulting and collaborating closely with our experts, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks discovered Adobe’s new AEM Edge Delivery Services (EDS). It offered to address these four goals, with the unique benefit of an astonishingly short implementation time. Investing in a new CMS and adopting new systems is no small feat, but Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks moved forward with conviction, certain that this direction would help them achieve their vision.
The solution
Raising the limit of what’s possible: migrating from a legacy platform in record time
Cognizant Netcentric is the first Adobe partner to implement EDS on our very own website. We have also had input from the very start of this new CMS project’s development. This unique expertise has helped us understand what Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks needed to achieve their business goals, as well as be the Adobe partner to make it happen.
When Cognizant Netcentric proposed an agile 6-8 week transition to cloud-native, EDS, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks took the leap of faith at a pivotal moment to invest in innovation – and it paid off. Guided by Cognizant Netcentric and supported by the Adobe VIP team, the migration was straightforward and rolled out quickly. The complete two brand websites, 600 pages, were “lifted and shifted” in 30 days. In fact, the implementation timeline of Edge Delivery Services came in at just a quarter of the time it would have taken to implement the solution that Volvo Group was considering previously.
In that short time span, Cognizant Netcentric delivered two fully functional automotive websites including features such as product pages, configurators and even dealer searches (made possible by out of the box features of Edge Delivery Services as well as our AEM Search Connector).
Key benefits
The benefits of AEM Edge Delivery Services
Designed for speed, ease of use and scalability, Edge Delivery Services streamlines the process of publishing content to the web, eliminating the need for clunky and outdated CMS interfaces and extensive development support. Its intuitive click-to-publish solution frees up considerable cost and time, requiring only standard HTML, CSS, and Javascript - this platform allows developers to focus on complex tasks.
For internal stakeholders like content editors and publishers, the editing experience has become agile and easy. Content editing and publishing processes are now streamlined via the AEM Franklin browser extension that makes creating web pages as effortless as creating a new Microsoft Word document and leveraging the functions of Sharepoint - in Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks case.
Leveraging AEM Edge Delivery Services means that Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks teams can now benefit from:
- Creating and editing content directly in the browser for a fluid and agile authoring experience.
- Direct collaboration and version control, leveraging the built-in functionality of Office 365 and/or Google Suite products, with more authoring tools to come.
- Simplified digital asset management with directly embedded assets or by using URL referencing.
- Speedy learning curve, intuitive interface and easy support for agile working.
- Accelerated development focused on industry standards, using blocks and columns with no complex frameworks.
- Increased web performance, with performance audits on each code change resulting in a Google Lighthouse score of 100 on live pages.
Results
Driving results across the business and improving user experiences
AEM Edge Delivery was also uniquely positioned to meet the immediate needs of both Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks sites while embodying the wider Volvo Group’s IT architecture strategy of reuse and consolidation. This cloud-native CMS technology made it possible to reuse components and templates, which meant Cognizant Netcentric could salvage useful components from the previous CMS and Volvo could meet its global, strategic objectives.
Putting stellar visibility and web performance front and center
Putting SEO and web performance first, AEM Edge Delivery is designed to ensure a top Google Lighthouse score and Core Web Vitals. This new architecture produced a massive boost in web performance and keyword visibility went from page ten to the top 3 of Google Search results.
Some key performance indicators that Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks saw once implementation was complete:
- The Google Lighthouse score of the new website soared from 35 to 100
- Core Web Vitals improved from 60 to 100
- The new websites saw a record increase in visibility from 2.5-4% to 43% – all pointing to vastly improved search rankings and user experience.
- Additionally, the websites saw a 50% reduction in server-response times.
Get in touch
The route to success
Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks teams planned ahead, expecting the unexpected in this ever-changing, disrupting digital era. Working with Cognizant Netcentric, Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks has been able to tap into the capabilities of AEM Edge Delivery Services to optimize key parts of their content and web development operations, causing a ripple effect throughout the organization and down to the end user experience. All the while delivering on their business goals of upgrading their CMS, accelerating time-to-market, improving the editing experience and achieving stellar SEO performance and visibility.
This agile, bold approach to investing in the right technology with the right experts, empowered Volvo Trucks and Mack Trucks to meet the demands of today’s digitized automotive industry, and is contributing to their competitive position in an ever-evolving market. We’re honored to be on this journey with Volov and Mack Trucks on delivering customer experience excellence.
Curious how Cognizant Netcentric’s team of experts can help your business leverage the latest technology to succeed among the best in digital experience? Let's talk
