Mars: CPG Starter Kit Platform

The Client

Across its diverse and expanding portfolio of confectionery, food, and petcare products and services, Mars employs 133,000 dedicated associates who are all moving in the same direction: forward. With $40 billion in annual sales, it produces some of the world’s best-loved brands including DOVE, EXTRA, M&M’s, MILKY WAY, SNICKERS, TWIX, ORBIT, PEDIGREE, ROYAL CANIN, SKITTLES, BEN’S ORIGINAL, WHISKAS, COCOAVIA, and 5; and takes care of half of the world’s pets through its pet health services AniCura, Banfield Pet Hospitals, BluePearl, Linnaeus, and VCA.

The Situation

MARS wanted to scale its CPG starter kit platform to build, deploy, and operate its digital properties for promotional and brand sites, including Mars Snacking, Mars Food & Nutrition, Mars Petcare, and Mars Fishcare segments. 

The Challenge

In its journey to scale its CPG platform, Mars faced numerous challenges:

• Getting new website launches to market faster, while collaborating with integration partners, including BazaarVoice, PriceSpider, OneTrust, and more
• Enhancing performance scalability to improve caching and remove performance bottlenecks
• Maintaining consumption entitlements within agreed limits, boosting performance and page speed
• Optimizing security parameters to identify and reduce bot attacks and maintain compliance standards

The Solution

Mars tapped partner Cognizant Worldwide Limited (CWW) to collaborate on scaling its CPG starter kit platform. Collaborating with Mars stakeholders, Cognizant followed Agile methodology to deliver the new features every two weeks. The teams established checklists to support faster brand site launches, including campaign requests to ensure Mars achieved its business goals.

From a platform operations standpoint, Cognizant established a dashboard in the ServiceNow tool to track the SLAs, KPIs, and other metrics, ensuring business continuity as usual. And Cognizant collaborated with Mars to onboard designers, working closely with the brand team to create and deliver assets less expensively.

Cognizant's analytics team helped Mars build a single, unified analytics dashboard to track various metrics and migrated to Google Analytics 4 in the Acquia platform. The Cognizant team also engaged with the Mars Enterprise Architecture (EA) team to review new solutions, leveraging Acquia professional service and technical account management (TAM) support to validate the architecture.

The teams used Acquia Site Factory with the Emulsify theme to provide a Storybook component library, a Webpack development environment, and a Drupal 10 theme. Emulsify is an open source tool for creating design systems with reusable components and clear guidelines for teams. Using Emulsify helped scale the design while reducing costs, streamlining workflows, and improving accessibility. And Site Factory helped to integrate with Azure for automated code deployment and testing, preventing human errors introduced via manual processes.

The platform uses Cloudflare as a content delivery network (CDN), which is tuned to achieve high performance to handle 2,000+ concurrent users in peak load. Cognizant implemented page rules, bot management, rate limiting, image sizing, and caching optimization to improve the performance and security of each website within the Acquia platform.

Because the teams were able to integrate all the brand sites with the Salsify platform, brand marketers can manage all product information in one place. This has helped marketers manage, maintain, and stay compliant across all the brands and helped to roll out the sites faster. And integrating the platform with Lighthouse for digital asset management has helped boost website performance, making it easier for team members to manage image and video assets without any technical dependency.

The Results

Cognizant has deployed more than 60 new capabilities on the CPG platform over the last year and helped ensure all brand sites are launched on schedule while meeting security and accessibility compliance standards.

With the CPG starter kit platform, Mars business stakeholders are less dependent on agency partners and able to operate on the platform independently. This ease of use has paid off; in just 1.5 years, Mars has launched 205 sites on Site Factory, with plans to launch an additional 200+ sites by 2024. Mars can deploy brand sites more frequently without any performance or stability issues:

• Full-fledged brand sites with key capabilities can launch within 2-3 days
• Simple sites can be launched in 2 days
• Medium sites can be launched in 3-5 days
• Complex sites can be launched in 8-10 days 
   

Mars can ensure that incidents and service requests are resolved within SLA timelines. Cognizant helped the brand team and end users smoothly onboard into ServiceNow, helping the brand move away from the inefficient traditional way of raising any issues — e.g., through emails and follow-ups. Using ServiceNow, Mars team members can report potential issues easily and more efficiently. 

Using its CPG platform, Mars assesses its cache percentage for sites every week, identifying major consumption contributions and implementing corrective measures. This monitoring helped Mars stay within the agreed Acquia entitlement consumption and prevented the company from spending more while launching additional sites on the same platform. Whereas prior entitlement consumption reached 200%, in collaboration with Acquia TAM, Cognizant brought it down to 60%.

Additionally, the CPG platform ensures that Mars site launches follow recommended data quality management (DQM) criteria, implementing corrective actions if the score goes below the threshold. This has led to better website performance, inspiring the company's confidence in the platform's scalability.

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