Hologic

The Client

Hologic, Inc. is a global medical technology innovator focused on improving the health and well-being of women, their families, and communities through early detection and treatment. Its advancements include the invention of the world's first commercial 3D mammography system to find breast cancer earlier; leadership in testing for cervical cancer, sexually transmitted infections and respiratory illnesses; and minimally invasive surgical technologies for uterine fibroids, abnormal uterine bleeding, and pediatric procedures.

The Situation

For its primary Hologic.com site, Hologic wanted the ability to feature a more modern and sophisticated digital approach to healthcare and how it is delivered while creating a unified global web presence. Its primary business objective was to reduce its overall spending on digital products while providing customers a consolidated, branded, and consistent experience to learn about its complete product offering. Hologic needed a single digital hub capable of providing a global presence but still allowing each division to showcase its products in a consistent, branded, and compliant manner, all while reducing costs, technical debt, and friction between business and regional units.

The Challenge

Hologic faced numerous challenges in modernizing its digital approach. It had a siloed system of fully autonomous, regional corporate sites, which it hoped to bring together into a shared design system and a strategy for ongoing support. Hologic was also struggling with managing an extensive collection of marketing microsites built as needed by siloed teams across the company. Together, the family of sites was difficult for their owners to manage or upgrade, expensive to maintain, and routinely ran the risk of being out of compliance with branding and legal requirements. 

Additionally, Hologic's microsites were directly competing against each other and the main corporate site for search engine rankings. Creating and maintaining the disparate microsites was not only extremely expensive, but it was painstakingly time-consuming to create one-off features used for one site, division, and region. Because leads arrived from multiple web properties, marketers lacked a clear path to identify and qualify leads. And customers had numerous touchpoints but no clear route to the single source of truth. 

The Solution

Hologic and partner FFW approached this project using a strategic lens – thinking in terms of the future and how to foster collaboration between product owners, divisional marketing leads, and marketing communications teams on both a regional and global level. From the start, a global, cross-divisional working team helped ensure that each feature implemented into the product would meet the requirements and aspirations of the teams.

FFW leveraged Hologic’s existing Drupal site to create a multisite system that allowed the Hologic corporate sites to share a code base and ongoing maintenance expenses. FFW also crafted custom-branded Site Studio components and helpers to make in-house creation and ongoing management of Hologic's pages possible, dramatically decreasing the company's agency dependency and expanding its ability to keep these sites unified and branded. Reusable Site Studio components facilitate a consistent and branded approach across Hologic's hub. With defined colors, fonts, and styles at the component level, Site Studio enables the company to quickly create consistent, branded content using a drag-and-drop approach. 

FFW and other agency designers can quickly and effectively spin up new concepts and components using Hologic's design system and Site Studio's UI toolkit as a starting point. FFW developers can quickly turn designs and written specifications into structured content templates and components using Site Studio's component builder, content template builder, and master template builder. Site Studio's style guide manager has also made styling easier for front-end developers.

What began as a site rebuild has commenced current and future initiatives that will benefit Hologic on a global scale. Hologic's corporate site rebuild on Site Studio led to socializing ideas around consolidating the marketing microsites. This effort's success has led to the planned move of most of Hologic's regional corporate sites into a multisite platform and faster-than-anticipated consolidation of the marketing microsites onto this network. Over 100 microsites have been consolidated and archived in the last two years. By the end of 2024, Hologic's corporate sites in Europe and North America will have joined the effort.

The Results

Together, FFW and Holologic transformed and upgraded the U.S. corporate site and, at the request of the country-specific site owners, are working to move Hologic’s Canada, nine EMEA, and five APAC country websites onto a new, centralized hub using Acquia Site Studio. 

By leveraging the U.S. site as its core for new content and feature development, syndication, and code updates, the hub includes a comprehensive build kit that allows business units across Hologic to quickly and easily spin up fully functional, brand-compliant sites that do not incur technical debt. The sites and departments share features and functionalities, offering the flexibility to reach aspirational goals and vastly reduce the total cost of ownership. Meanwhile, an organization-wide content and governance strategy ensures the platform remains scalable in terms of both content and functionality.

The result of this approach is a comprehensive solution that can comfortably support multiple regional hubs with numerous country and/or campaign sub-sites. Each sub-site can autonomously manage its content while taking advantage of the broader Hologic ecosystem's shared branding, structure, and feature sets. This enables Hologic to share digital content across North America, EMEA, and, eventually, Canada and the APAC region. 

Using this strategy, Hologic can generate and share content between regions, including managing and syndicating content across country sites using localization and translation workflows. By participating in the syndication strategy for content and code shared from the corporate site, the international sites can benefit from everything the hub offers without being forced into an identical structure.

"The success of this project is having a ripple effect across the business, and we couldn't have made it work without the Acquia tools that let us move from an expensive, siloed collection of websites that were hard to manage to a streamlined network of sites that we can keep updated, compliant, and branded. And we can do most of the work in-house. We have only just started to add up the cost savings of this move, but the value of creating a branded digital ecosystem and an intuitive user experience is priceless," concluded Jenifer Snow, Lead, Digital Strategy and Design at Hologic.