BMG LABTECH is a life science company and has been a leader in the development and production of microplate readers for 25 years. The analyzers are used in drug development, the biotechnology industry and in academic research institutions. The company has an international presence with over 100 employees at sites in Germany, France, Australia, the UK, Japan and the USA. All products are produced at the main site in Ortenberg near Offenburg and are subject to strict quality controls. BMG LABTECH also applies this quality standard to its external communication. Accordingly, a modern website that presents the complex and diverse content in a user-friendly way is important to the company. Together with punkt.de, the company completely relaunched its website in July 2017 with improved functions aimed at a demanding clientele.
The challenge: multilingualism and a flood of documents
BMG LABTECH's website was redesigned back in 2013. However, it quickly became clear that the "home-made" content management system developed by the agency responsible for implementation was not user-friendly enough to maintain the website. In particular, adding multilingual content was very time-consuming for the team. The structure of the website also still had a lot of potential and the Google ranking suffered noticeably after the relaunch. This made it harder for potential customers to find. In addition, there was still no suitable solution for managing the scientific documents that BMG LABTECH provides as additional information for interested parties and customers.
Over 4,000 application notes, scientific posters and specialist articles needed to be retrievable and easily searchable for users. In addition, automatic links from the scientific documents should lead to the appropriate microplate readers. In the past, BMG LABTECH carried out all these imports and links manually, with editors having to enter every single Excel database and PDF into the system by hand. Given the volume of documents, this was almost a life task. The company also wanted to improve the mobile website and reduce loading times to make it easier to find online. In addition to these search engine optimization measures, another key point for BMG LABTECH was the optimization of customer support. The new website was to offer customers the opportunity to send even large file attachments quickly and securely to BMG LABTECH's customer service.
After BMG LABTECH was able to specify all these requirements, they found the perfect partner for the implementation of their new, modern website in punkt.de.
The solution: Open source with TYPO3 and Nextcloud
The new website was implemented by punkt.de on the basis of the open source content management system TYPO3 version 8. Thanks to their many years of experience with TYPO3 projects, the developers were able to quickly find solutions to BMG LABTECH's individual problems. "It was clear to us right from the start that we wanted to work with TYPO3," says Lisa Schmidt, Press Officer at BMG LABTECH. "Initial experience within the team and additional recommendations confirmed our choice of content management system. In addition, our experience in recent years with an inflexible closed source system has shown us the value of a community and good expandability of the system. That's why we came across punkt.de, not least because of the convincing references and the proximity. "
We also found the non-binding workshop at the beginning of our collaboration particularly convincing. This allowed us to quickly get a good impression of whether we were a good match.
Lisa Schmidt,
Press Officer at BMG LABTECH
"In addition, the workshop, also thanks to the input from the design agency made in, ensured that we thought more carefully about some things before the start of the project that we had neglected up to that point. The workshop was therefore the perfect starting signal for our collaboration."
An important factor for the improved usability of the website is the cloud-based file sharing system Nextcloud. "The large number of documents can be better managed via the cloud. And BMG LABTECH's support team can also process requests directly via the cloud, no matter how large the attachments are," says Sebastian Helzle, Product Owner at punkt.de. "We were also able to implement the automatic import and linking of all scientific documents, as well as optimal searchability of the huge scientific database."
After the relaunch, the search field is prominently linked on the homepage so that users can search for the right product for them without any detours. In addition, BMG LABTECH can create individual quick links on the subpages that draw attention to current events or prominent landing pages. With a comparison tool, potential customers can directly compare two different readers in order to better compare functions and scope of services. For the greatest possible protection of sensitive customer data, BMG LABTECH also works together with punkt.de for hosting. punkt.de, the specialist for individual web applications, has its own data center in Karlsruhe and all data is therefore subject to German data protection law.
"A major relaunch like this is of course a full-time job alongside the actual work," says Markus Hartmann, online marketing specialist at BMG LABTECH and project manager for the website relaunch. "Especially in the beginning, the main part of the work was done by punkt.de. That took a lot off our hands. Even later, when we entered the content and questions arose, communication with punkt.de was always very easy."
"We work with the Confluence wiki and the Jira project management tool as standard for every project. This ensures the greatest possible transparency and allows us to exchange information with our customers quickly. As a result, BMG LABTECH always knew in detail where the implementation was currently at," says Sebastian Helzle.
The result: Continuous relaunch and a future-proof system
"Thanks to the many automated processes and the improved usability of multilingual content, we will certainly save around 20 percent of the time we previously needed for content maintenance," says Lisa Schmidt from BMG LABTECH. This is particularly interesting as all content, including that of the international subsidiaries, was previously created, managed and published by a two-person team at the German head office. Now, with the newly gained efficiency, this task can be handled much better by the small team. Plans for additional functionalities are already in the works. In the course of the continuous relaunch, during which the website will be continuously optimized and expanded with new functions, it will be possible in future to further individualize the individual international pages with country-specific events and information by means of geolocalization, for example. In addition to the comparison tool, there will also be a product advisor. With the help of specific questions for the user, this tool can then suggest the perfect microplate reader for every need. This makes the search for the right device even easier and BMG LABTECH has achieved its goal: the best products combined with the best support on a modern platform that can be expanded at any time using the open source content management system TYPO3.
