Technology and Digital Teams Quarterly Update

Every quarter, the Technology and Digital Teams, who are under Toby Russell’s lead, will present their recent activities and 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. This update covers the June to August period.

Toby says: “Over the last 2 years, we have made a lot of changes in the digital and technology teams in order to structure ourselves correctly and improve our delivery of projects and services to the wider Colart community. 

One of the cornerstones of this strategy has been to ensure all of the key competencies are covered by an internal team and to reduce our reliance on third party businesses and contractors. We have now reached our goal whereby we no longer use any contract resources and have minimised our use of external businesses which has yielded excellent improvements in our delivery whilst significantly reducing costs.

I’d like to thank my team for all of their hard work in driving things forward, the details of which you can read below. Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to come and see me as I’m always keen to hear thoughts.”

• Successful migration of all French systems including M3 to a more stable and robust platform to safeguard and futureproof systems and data.
• Reduction of a further £10,000 a month by swapping expensive 3rd party managed internet lines and manging the network internally.
• Automation of infrastructure workloads to give the team more time to work on valuable workstreams.
• Improvement of network links to the French disaster recovery site.

• Project United, which is the standardisation of all Colart email addresses and login credentials across the whole company is well underway, with already over 30% of the total company already being switched to the new system.
• The facilities portal project is going live this Friday 13th September. This will allow London employees to log on any facilities related issues and requests onto the IT Servicedesk for a more simple and quick management.
• The Skype for Business migration is on-going according to plan, with Head Office and our Benelux offices next to be migrated. This means that our system will be hosted by Microsoft, which will help with call quality, especially large conference calls such as Town Hall Meetings.

Winsor & Newton

This summer has seen the activation of the Winsor & Newton Fineliner and Studio Collection campaigns with great engagement both on social media and through emails..

• The Fineliner campaign, that ran between 10th July and 18th August was successful in bringing visitors to the Winsor & Newton website: within this period, we had 26% more visits to the website compared to the previous period (31st May to 9th July).
• The hero video of the Studio Collection campaign has reached over 111,650 views on Instagram.

Snazaroo

Another big project during the summer was the preparation behind the up-coming relaunch of the Snazaroo website. Snazaroo will be our second website that will benefit from PIM (our Product Information Management System) after Liquitex. The digital team has been working hard both behind the scenes on the backend as well as on the navigation and design on the front end in order to improve the consumer experience. The new website will be launched in the coming weeks – stay tuned!

Here is a little preview if you cannot wait…:

Liquitex

The new website that was launched in April continues to perform very well with both high-quality traffic and a lower bounce rate (which is the percentage of users that visit the website and didn’t click on anything before they left) – it dropped from 51% to 31.81%.

Visitors also stay longer on the website, spending an average of 2:14 minutes and browsing through 3.13 pages per visit on average.

If you haven’t done so in a while, click here to visit !

Intranet Launch

In early June the new Intranet, hosted on WordPress, was launched. Being completely managed in-house, it is more flexible and was created in a collaborative manner through a global survey.

Since the launch, we saw the success of having a bigger, more interactive wall. The design is leaner and information more easily accessible.

The Intranet is also in constant evolution with small and big new features regularly appearing. The Sustainability Report is now available in English, French and Chinese. Have you also seen the Dashboard numbers are updated every month? We also have a regular fun Poll on the home page – don’t hesitate to participate or to send your improvement/suggestions to news@colart.com

Upcoming this autumn

• The team is fully geared up for the busy autumn period with digital campaigns activations across all digital channels (websites, email, social media…), targeting different audience segments such as in the current Winsor & Newton Promarker campaign and Liquitex Basics campaign.
• Lefranc Bourgeois is focussing on content activation for the Nan King inks range, new masking liquid, the Linel gouache range as well as the gift sets.
• Snazaroo is gearing up for the Halloween campaign, which will start on October 1st.

• As mentioned on recent Intranet news, the MRC Portal has just been launched on the Intranet so now all users can access these reports as well as understand what is available.
• A new cloud-based database has been built on Microsoft Azure (the Microsoft Cloud Platform) which has greatly improved scalability and allows us to leverage off the latest software integrated with Microsoft Azure, such as PowerBi (the portal to see all reports).
• M3 data is now refreshed daily into the cloud in an automated process. This has and will greatly reduce the volume of manual work whilst also improving accuracy.
• The Cognos Decommission Project is underway with a GoLive launch of the new platform to be made available in the next few weeks. This platform will allow users to analyse very large volumes of data using PowerBi and Live Connection in Excel.
• Users will now be able to automate their reporting as well as gain further insights into the business that were previously very time consuming to analyse.
• The new PowerBi Portal will be going live in the next few weeks which will contain further modules which users can use such as Stock, Purchase Orders, Customer Balance and Merchandising.
• The end goal is “One Source of the Truth” and the above modules aim to do just that.

• Organisational changes towards a better performance and more efficiency, bringing to the business a solid response for global solutions and synergy to the company’s strategy
• Project Vanilla and Vanilla Plus being conducted across all different workstreams. This is priority number one for the entire system team to achieve this important milestone to the company.
• In order to guarantee everything is under the correct path, we have performed tests and cutover tasks to prepare the environment as it would be in production, mitigating risks of impacts to the business during the Go live planned for 6th of January 2020.
• There is much more to come: User acceptance tests in US and other regions, Go / No Go meetings to review progress and make sure we will be placing changes on M3 accordingly
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) improvements has been seen across the business with a dedicated organisation between project manager, specialists and finance. All of that to guarantee we have a crystal-clear processes and onboard more customers to automated work flow.