At VITRONIC, we always have our finger on the digital pulse: Keeping abreast with trends in interconnected topics in which our products are involved, such as Smart City, IoT in the industry, and new forms of automation. In fact, VITRONIC boasts a long tradition of digitalization. Since the company was founded in the eighties, VITRONIC has committed itself to making analog information available and interpretable in its digital format. That forward-thinking mindset reflects itself today in various ways, including how we supply body scanners that create 3D models with more and more possible applications.
The new platform catapults us far ahead in terms of digitalization
With the new website, we are taking bold steps in the direction of digitalization in both our communications and services. Designed as a platform, it serves as the central hub for our clients and partners, who are clearly in focus regarding structure, content and digital services.
We put a lot of energy in the remit of Design and UX (User Experience), prioritising making sure that the visitor can quickly navigate the website. This process involved drawing on our own experience with our clients, having studied what is important to them and what information and services they need.
We want to continue to design the website based on the needs of customers and visitors, which is why we created a user council that can help us manage and use feedback to develop new ideas.
The new website is more than a fancy tool for marketing: Integrated transformations can be driven in an objective and useful way.
It’s all about networks, and that applies as much to how we handle the technical aspect in terms of using interfaces and interactive tools, to how we interact with each other face to face. This is how we’d like to iron out possible areas of friction and strengthen our collaboration with clients and partners. One way we plan to do this is by making sure our application pages always list a specific contact person, complete with their contact information.
The classical method used for creating new digital applications is called the “waterfall” and it organises tasks to be completed in linear fashion. For example, the team involved in conceptualising the project will pass it on to the design team, with the technical team taking over from there, followed by those involved in content creation. We opted for a more agile approach, meaning that there was a lively exchange across departments through the project. Timings, parameters and resource allocations were continuously adjusted based on practical implementations and new discoveries. This is how we were able to constantly develop concepts and ideas during the process as and where needed.
Working with agility also means leaving behind the security of fixed plans in favour of working with greater creativity and dynamism. We wanted to get the most out of all working methods, so we also organised subtasks according to the classical method, e.g. by mapping out certain fixed, developmental steps. By combining this approach with a more agile development method, we were able to constantly develop concepts and ideas according to prioritised meaningfulness efficiently.
Of course, there were also challenges. For example, content creation required more effort than we expected, especially because our aim to make sure the site was user-friendly meant our text had to be reader-friendly. It would not have made sense to recycle old content from the old website. This is why we cut down the word count of all our content to about one third of the original text. We made sure the language we used was direct and easy-to-understand, and could appeal to different kinds of readers, from those who like to scan a text to those who prefer to spend more time on a page learning.
Another thing we did a bit differently was to refrain from reporting from within the project, which is usually the case in B2B. This is because we put the customer at the center of everything we do and want to make solving his or her problems our priority. This approach overhauls our communicative perspective. While we have always kept the environment in which our solutions are used in mind, we emphasise this now even more by not only providing facts and figures in the description of our products, but also by focusing on their use and application.
Meanwhile, we have also laid the foundations for further expansion, both technically and in the design of the front end. This includes linking services to products, and digitising internal processes linked to the website, to name but a few possibilities.
Which brings us back to the topic of digitisation: Our solutions operate in a digital environment. And with our new online platform, we are bringing this to the web.