Caleffi: a multi-country product portal for a global manufacturer

Goals

• Replatform the legacy enterprise portal and migrate content from an older version of Drupal.
• Redesign information architecture, user experience and visual identity for installers, designers and wholesalers.
• Integrate an external PIM as the single source of truth for product data, leaving editorial content to country teams.
• Support 30 country sites and more than 20 languages from a single platform.
• Deliver a mobile-first experience for technical users consulting product information on construction sites, in thermal plants and during inspections.

Challenge

Over a decade the portal had grown into an industry information hub well beyond its commercial origin: thousands of product variants, dozens of asset types per product (videos, brochures, navigable diagrams, BIM, technical drawings), digital magazines, design diagrams and dimensioning software. Years of incremental work had layered information in ways that no longer matched how technical users navigated the catalogue. The rebuild had to clean up that legacy while preserving uptime and SEO.

Solution

• The product catalogue was redesigned from scratch as a complex content model in Drupal, with product data consumed from the PIM via REST APIs.
• Drupal stays in sync with the PIM and augments PIM data with editorial information created and managed by country editors directly in the CMS.
• A Design System was formalised covering colour, typography, spacing, components and templates. Country editors compose pages from the component library and cannot break the visual rules.
• Each country has its own editorial team but inherits global brand foundations from the parent company. Smaller branches can also reuse content already produced by other countries through a shared dashboard.
• User journeys validated through personas, customer journey mapping and user stories built with the client in workshops.

Timeline and major milestones

The new platform replaced a previous portal that had been in production for around ten years. The current version went live in autumn, after a multi-quarter programme that covered strategic assessment, co-design, Design System formalisation, content migration, PIM integration and a staggered rollout across country sites.

Project management approach

Agile delivery with co-design as the leading method. The early phase combined a qualitative construction of personas, customer journey mapping and user stories formalised together with the client. Implementation worked in iterations against a prioritised backlog. Country sites were rolled out in sequence rather than as a single big-bang launch, which let editors and country teams get hands-on training as their site went live.

What makes this project special

Three things: the scale (30 countries, 20+ languages, thousands of product references with dozens of asset types each), the clean separation between the PIM as the single source of truth for product data and Drupal as the editorial environment, and the longevity of the platform choice (over a decade on Drupal, with the team confidently re-confirming the choice for the next decade).

Outcomes

• Product information centralised and kept current in real time across all country sites.
• Subsidiaries worldwide manage their own content autonomously without breaking brand consistency.
• Mobile experience optimised for the on-site usage patterns that analytics had revealed.
• In the words of the client's Digital Innovation Manager, the launch represented a revolution in how product information and assets are managed, more than a simple website refresh.