Organization

Challenge

One of Huhtamaki North America's strategic initiatives to increase customer satisfaction and drive revenues was to use the web to expose their product catalogs to a larger audience. They had already established several internal successes using the Liferay Portal platform within their daily operations.

A key decision was made to revamp the public website presence and to integrate it with existing enterprise systems, which housed the various product catalogs.

Because the product catalogs crossed internal boundaries for lines of business, different teams needed the ability to easily and consistently maintain the system.

Resolution

Huhtamaki North America selected Liferay Portal to develop their new customer website. Huhtamaki chose Xtivia for the company's track record of successful Liferay Portal implementations to help them accomplish their vision. With a timeline and budget in mind, Xtivia collaborated extensively with the business and IT teams to establish an Agile approach that would meet their needs and result in a maintainable solution. Xtivia worked cohesively with a third-party design firm to translate a modern user experience into a Liferay User Interface.

Core default Liferay Portal features that were leveraged on this project include:

• Web Content Management
• Documents and Media Management
• Enterprise Search
• Liferay Themes leveraging Velocity, CSS, HTML5, and AUI
• Site Staging and Publishing

More than 40 public facing pages were brought to life on the Liferay-built site at www.us.huhtamaki.com with a design that exemplifies the Huhtamaki brand and philosophy. Multiple content structures and display templates were designed to deliver consistency and repeatability using Liferay Web Content Management (WCM). This Sustainability page, which describes Huhtamaki's efforts towards reducing its environmental impact, demonstrates an effective and innovative use of the parallax scrolling technique.

Multiple product catalogs were designed to be highly responsive to minimize page load times. The single-page interfaces use popular JavaScript frameworks such as AlloyUI and Backbone.js to avoid page reloads and maximize system resources as users navigate through a large volume of products.

Modern best practices for application architecture were a key consideration when handling integration with existing systems to retrieve product data. A services tier encapsulates a manageable REST API to decouple the systems and enable them to scale while minimizing downtime.

"Liferay Portal is a proven enterprise portal platform with a large customer base and a high level of customer satisfaction. Liferay Portal includes an intuitive interface and the latest website technologies. These features helped us achieve rapid website development," said Chris Cooper, PMP, Project Manager at Huhtamaki.

"We are impressed that Liferay continually recognizes Xtivia as the Liferay North America Partner of the Year. We selected Xtivia and found that they were great partners with us and our third-party web design team.

"Xtivia's website development team has a friendly, professional approach to their work. They helped us achieve our website vision and provided expert guidance along the way. With Xtivia we were able to produce an outstanding, functional and reliable website to help us connect to our customers. In addition, we were able to do so within our project budget and timeline!"

Business Value Added

Xtivia's team leveraged the Liferay development paradigm to deliver an extremely fast and easy-to-use online product catalog, which allows users to quickly find the exact products they desire. This implementation effectively leverages Liferay capabilities that drive consistency and maintainability throughout the website.