Adapting e-commerce & digital operations for an ever-changing world

Our client is a healthcare organization consisting of three hospitals providing a variety of primary and specialty physician services. NorthStar is providing B2B professional services to our client’s marketing organization to lead and manage their website redesign initiative through various project phases. They were looking to replace their existing websites with a fresh, modern, unified web experience that highlights their unique brand, improves the user experience and delivers measurable results in terms of expanded opportunities to recruit patients, physicians and partners through improved content and online services. 

NorthStar needed to capture all of the business drivers from the physician, marketing, and information technology perspectives and ensure alignment amongst all project stakeholders. We knew this would be the key to ensure a clear understanding of the priorities that would guide the discovery and vendor selection process as well as forecast the project initiation timeline for the successful redesign.

NorthStar led the effort in determining the evaluation criteria for vendors, building scoring models, assessing functional requirements, and conducting technical analysis of a variety of content management and provider management platforms. We produced a comprehensive analysis of alternatives looking at key metrics to help inform our client of the most technologically sound and affordable options. 

Our project achieved several projected goals and milestones.  

• Leveraged NorthStar’s rigorous analysis and chose to proceed with NorthStar’s recommended vendors to execute the website redesign.  
• NorthStar guided them through the procurement process building design documentation and process/data flows in order to enable a smooth transition to project initiation. 
• With the help of contracted talent for both content management system and provider management system vendors and initiated their website redesign project. 

NorthStar continues to lead and manage the implementation project through vendor coordination, integration management, operational strategic planning, risk mitigation, and change management oversight.

A leading hospitality company was experiencing delays and long period gaps before identifying issues and crashes on its website and mobile platform causing loss of revenue and impacting customer experiences. Client sought to implement a solution and program that reduced gaps in identifying issues resulting in increased revenue and improved customer experience.

In collaboration with multiple areas within the Clients Digital Organization and utilizing a series of tools and functionality, a 4 phased program was implemented to combat a series of areas and issues that were identified as key drivers:

• Real Time Dashboard
• Proactive Monitoring KPI Dashboards
• Intelligence Alerts
• Communication Plan

Working together, the program proved to be extremely valuable.  Key results: 

• Time to identify issues went from 3.5 days to 3 hours
• $17.5M reduction in lost revenue comparing issues pre-launch vs. post-launch

A global media and technology company chose NorthStar Solutions Group to develop a content management strategy and save a multi-million-dollar Content Management System (CMS) investment from getting replaced prior to being fully operationalized.  In addition to selecting key technology vendors to partner with, NorthStar focused on changing the mindset to a “one CMS, one site” objective operating on key principles of simplicity, operational efficiency, and business process improvement.  

With the project dangerously close to failure and the technology in jeopardy of getting thrown out, the client turned to the management consultants at NorthStar for help. The NorthStar engagement helped them evolve from having an over-customized, disparate system unable to scale to meet the needs of its enterprise stakeholders, to a stable, scalable and highly efficient platform operating on the vendor’s latest technology.  

With NorthStar, our client found a partner with industry leading domain expertise and proven success in implementing and operationalizing content management systems. NorthStar was engaged to augment internal teams and systematically drive improvement in the following ways:  

• Develop a continuous upgrade model  
• Define taxonomies  
• Mature governance and workflow processes  
• Automate configuration and code promotion  
• Upgrade platform infrastructure  
• Create user support and training models  
• Define information and system governance processes  

Since engaging with NorthStar in 2013, the company overcame numerous challenges with their CMS platform. In addition to multiple successful upgrades to the latest CMS version, they implemented a new governance model for both content and systems, and adopted a recommended user support and training program.  They also streamlined delivery teams and moved to operating under consolidated code releases on a standard schedule. These changes have resulted in protection of their investment and ability to leverage an enterprise-wide solution across multiple channels for years to come. 

A top regional healthcare system’s existing platform was outdated and not able to efficiently manage new content, imagery, and video. To address enterprise wide goals for patients and members, partnership and recruitment, and enable new functionality, the client knew they would have to migrate to a more robust and intuitive platform. The new platform, Sitecore 8.1, offered the functionality to streamline management of their current sites, while enabling a modern look and facilitating ongoing development. Once in place, the client had a powerful tool, but was up against a strict launch timeline that involved significant content migration, with limited resources and training to execute in-house.

Undertaking content migration can often be the hardest part of implementing a new CMS. NorthStar’s understanding of the complexity and variations of this type of project, combined with the necessary end-to-end support for this effort, helped our client to successfully achieve its business objectives and launch the new site on-schedule and with high-quality content. To support the client’s business goals, NorthStar utilized a business process outsourcing team with strong Sitecore CMS skills. This team collaborated with the client to develop a scope and timeline for the content migration, including project management oversight and training to ensure timely completion. NorthStar coordinated and executed the migration of more than 1,600 content pages and associated imagery to a new Web Content Management System (CMS). In addition, NorthStar provided training and education on the new process for creating and maintaining content after the initial eight-month migration period.

The work completed by the NorthStar team resulted in the complete migration of content from two major areas of the client’s website, as well as microsites, into Sitecore. Within a period of eight months, the NorthStar team migrated 1,614 web pages and 245 images while building out a structured library to organize the content. Along with migration, the NorthStar team created 22 new web forms and applied 450 tags to over 300 web pages. To further address the client’s challenges, valuable training was conducted to improve their functional capabilities. The new, fully-functional, website was launched in April 2017. As a result of NorthStar’s excellent customer service, efficient and professional work process, ability to adapt to the client’s lean environment, and flexibility to collaborate and train, NorthStar will be continuing to work with the client on additional projects, services, and solutions.