Technology and Digital Teams Update

Every quarter, the Technology and Digital Teams, who are under Toby Russell’s lead, are presenting their recent activities and achievements. For this update, we’re looking back at 2019 and all the team’s great achievements. We hope you enjoy these regular updates and if you have any question don’t hesitate to comment on the Intranet or to send an email out to news@colart.com.

Happy holidays!

• Delivering the infrastructure build out for DC4 enabling the Distribution Centre to go live on time without connectivity or infrastructure issues.
• Reduction in group network spend by circa £10,000 a month.
• Migration of failing Le Mans server environment to group standard technology improving fault tolerance, performance, scalability and redundancy without major disruption or downtime.
• Migration of group VPN platform to internally hosted system in 3 hours during major issue to minimise disruption to remote workers.
• Automation of infrastructure workloads and moving infrastructure team to incorporate DevOps practices.

• Successful global launch of the tech support, applications and facilities portal on Jira Service Desk, allowing users to submit requests and inform the relevant teams of issues in a much easier fashion.
• At the time of printing, we have successfully resolved 4969 tickets this year, with an average satisfaction rating of 4.9 / 5
• On target to complete project united, which has resulted in a much better experience for users accessing several different services at Colart, also, standardising email addresses across the company to a much more uniform format.
• Migrated several offices to office365 for phone services, with more landline phone contracts coming to an end in the next 12 months, we will migrate them as they become available.

Websites built and managed in-house

By the end of the year, we will have 13 sites migrated to the in-house managed WordPress system, Spectre: Key achievements this year include Liquitex, Snazaroo and our Intranet. Results of the relaunched websites are encouraging with more traffic, more sales, quicker load speed and lower bounce rate – so our consumers are staying on our sites for longer and buying more. A key highlight – we launched our personalisation engine – which means consumers browsing different products on the Liquitex website will have personalised recommendations based on their behaviour. Thanks to this we can already see that more than 12% of the web sales are coming through these personalised product recommendations. This will be rolled out onto Snazaroo and Winsor & Newton next year.

We continue the Digital Transformation journey, with the aim of bringing all website development and maintenance in-house, making us more agile as well as time and cost efficient. 2020 will be the year of Winsor Newton website relaunch.

Product Information Management System (PIM)

This year we have built the microservice between the Product Information Management tool (PIM) and WordPress. This mean that we now see huge efficiency in pulling the data automatically into websites and eventually into the B2B portal. So far, PIM is powering the new Liquitex and Snazaroo websites and contains 244,891 points to date. To have one source of truth for all our product information will drive efficiencies and efficacy.

Best in class email marketing

In 2018, we launched a new powerful email marketing platform called DotDigital. We can really see how this platform has improved our email marketing – 3M emails have been opened in 2019 and most of them targeted to different audiences in our database which makes the communication more relevant for the receiver. Audience targeting for Brand campaign emails generate 55% more clicks and we learn more about our consumers behavior and interest. We also featured on the reallygoodemails.com website with a WN email – the first art brand to be selected for this site.

Social Media

We now have 1,1m fans across our Brands social media channels which is a growth of +10% vs last year. Liquitex smashed the 100k Instagram target 2 months ahead of time, and we have seen 10m engagements (likes/ comments/ shares) on our content and communications across our Brands which is fantastic. We have also done more targeted paid ads on social media this year – so that we for exampel reach students and fine artists with adapted content and copy fit for their different needs. Next year will be an exicitng year for Social media as we start to activate more on Pinterest.

Consumer care

The Consumer care team answered more than 18,500 questions globally last year with huge support cross-functionally in Colart, from the Lab, TCE, TFAC, Regs, Factories and Brand teams all helping to support and making sure we get back to our consumers in time with the right answers while also capturing all the answers and building up a knowledge base. We welcomed Stefano to the team as Consumer Care team leader (moving from the Shopper team) and look forward to the exciting plans he has for 2020.

Analytics and reporting

In our quest to be more data-driven in our decision making a key priority for this year has been to create comprehensive campaign reports so that we learn and improve constantly and feedback insights to the Brand teams. With Adriano joining as Digital Analyst we have finally been able to give this important area the focus it deserves. Watch this space… more to come in 2020.

• We have managed to decommission Cognos to PowerBi, enabling the business to finally have ‘’one source of the truth” for invoiced sales.

This new platform will greatly improve reporting across the business and I’m looking forward to “super-user” training next year to really unlock the untapped potential of the new platform.

Much time was spent collaborating & training across the business to deliver the end solution and the current product is as a result of the collective efforts of many stakeholders.

Thank you all! Special mention to Delphine Vaucois, Patricia le Mauff, Stephanie Casertano and Andrew Kimball for leading the charge.

• The new Powerbi.com platform also has many other reports covering a broad range of area’s across Colart, which in the coming year will deliver added benefits as users become more familiar its potential. Next year we’ll be able to shift to a far more data-driven business to enable better decision making.
• The launch of the MRC portal on the intranet has provided the business with a single source for all these types of reports, where previously it was almost word of mouth that a report existed.
• In the back-end we shifted from an on-premise (physical) server to a cloud based server for the 90% of functions greatly reducing the risk of outage, reduce costs and increase speed.
• We have also removed the vast majority of the manual work required to maintain the legacy systems and offline master data files. This has and will free up the team to work on building further new tools & reports to help Colart users.
• The above was achieved with a brand new team finding their feet and excited to see what we achieve next year.

• Payslips Online – Public Portal available for Colart employees with full access to their payslips. Platform is now available for CIHL and Colfag employees. Next step is to implement the platform in Lowestoft.
• Project United – Single sign-on and consolidation of all existing user names across the whole business.
• Facilities Portal – Jira Service Desk – In cooperation with Tech Support Team we created Portal that is dedicated to report and track all maintenance issues in the Head Office. Person responsible for tracking and managing the issues is our receptionist, Elisabeth
• Sensei – eLearning platform for our employees to access variety of trainings.
• Platform will be fully available beginning of next year