 Hi, thanks for joining us today to talk about how E-PAM accelerates new digital experiences for Mars brands using site factory and a starter kit approach. I'm Seth Gregory, the global head of our Drupal and Acquia practice at E-PAM, and I'll be walking through some of the previous challenges at Mars. We'll talk about the starter kits and what they are, and then we'll walk through a few demos so that you can get an idea of exactly how the solution works. Prior to E-PAM beginning our work with Mars, they had consulted with Acquia Professional Services to assess the current state of their digital landscape. And at the time, they were lacking a platform strategy and couldn't share configuration and application design between sites. The implementations were unique to each segment or brand, leading to inefficiencies and unique individual maintenance needs for each of the brands. Even though the previous applications did share a site factory stack, they were each kind of built in a vacuum, so each of the unique applications required their own maintenance and support. And straightforward tasks like minor code changes or periodic security updates created significant risk and required individualized QA on each application to prevent regressions. The level of compliance for things like GDPR, accessibility and system security, all important things varied from site to site. And the relative autonomy of its brand managers around the globe made it challenging for Mars to track all its digital properties and their states of compliance. One thing we hear a lot, and was certainly the case here, was that attempts in the past to impose consistency and restrictions were usually poorly received because they were seen as too restrictive without enough consideration for brand identities and the individual cultures and processes of the groups that would have to implement them. So there was a need to actively shift from a site by site way of thinking to a more consistent, shared, configurable platform mindset. So to address those issues, EPAM partnered with Mars to realize this vision of the starter kits, the shared, sustainable processes, automated testing and a consistent content type structure shared across the platform. This provided a common starting point for new sites with a set of site building blocks to be expanded over time with the ability to add new components available to the entire platform as the needs of the brands evolve. This makes it much easier to consistently build new sites on the platform on a predictable schedule with customization to fit the individual needs of each brand. And of course it's all driven by a single code base that's maintained once for all applications and deployed on Aquiasite Factory. Out of the box, the starter kits provide integrations we've built based on Mars' use cases that enable new sites to quickly connect to systems and services that all the Mars brand sites rely on. For example, Lighthouse is the internal dam at Mars, so we built an integration module that allows sites to pull great media and content from across the entire Mars organization into the site. Salsify is the PIM that stores all the product data at Mars, so we're able to rely on Salsify as the product source of truth and each brand consumes their evolving product lineup as they grow or receive seasonal product changes. Mars also has where to buy functionality that integrates with several different providers on the back end based on regional demands of their brands and allows their customers to find shops nearby that might sell a product. There's quite a few more from CRM to product reviews, translation providers, and each of these integrations are configurable and set up when the site is created through the Drupal UI. That's the general approach of how the components work. The integrations are already there, so each brand just needs to configure the settings and the rest is taken care of. That way new sites can be built without a heavy dependence on developer resources. And the other important thing here is that while not every site might use every piece of functionality, every piece of functionality in the toolbox is available to all sites. And the platform is continuously evolving, so as we reach for new levels of engagement with customers on the sites, whether that's elements of gamification or personalization or commerce, the new functionality becomes available to all the sites on the platform. So let's jump right in. We have some demos that we're going to walk through now to see some of those integrations in action. But first, let's talk about Site Factory. Many of you might already be familiar with it, but it's a big part of what makes this whole system work as smoothly as it does. In addition to enforcing that single shared platform codebase, it makes it easy for content owners to build new sites, because all it takes to get started is the click of a button. And not only can you create new sites based on profiles, but you can duplicate existing sites. So let's do that here to get a demo version of the site to work with. We'll click Duplicate Site, give it a name, and we'll make a full site clone to bring over any content that's already there. It happens in the background, and it will let us know when it's ready. So another thing that Site Factory gives us is Federated Login or Single Sign-On. Now that our demo site is here, we can just click Login, and it will be automatically logged into our account on the site. So now we're in the site, but let's take a look at the Products page. We can see that at the moment it looks like we don't have any products. We can even go into the Admin to take a quick look at the content. No product variants, no products, but we can fix this. You remember I mentioned we have an integration with the Salsify PIM, which is the system of record for all the product data at Mars. So we'll go and configure our web services, and you can see a lot of the different integrations here, but we'll choose Salsify. There are a couple of different approaches here depending on the needs of the site, but we'll select the multi-channel approach, which brings the data from Salsify over to Drupal and creates entities on the site. We'll need to fill in some credentials here that will identify the organization, the channel, and our access token or API key. And then we can request an export from Salsify. It runs asynchronously, so we can check the status, and when it's ready, we can grab the URL for the JSON. And then we can run the migration itself. So the migration is finished now. And we can go back to the admin and check to see if everything has come in. We immediately see product variants here. And we can filter and check to see that our main products have come in as well. It is worth noting too that after this initial migration, updates can continue to execute in the background, so that the site is always up to date with the latest product information. So let's go home and then back to the products page, and now we can see all of our products. We can also click into a product detail page and see that the product image, title, any details, nutritional information, all of this has been imported straight from Salsify. So this is a really easy way to populate product content on brand sites and to ensure that new products, variants or changes to any of the details of existing products, continue to flow seamlessly into all the websites. So once we have our product detail page here, we might want to enhance it, and where to buy functionality is a good way to do that. You've learned all about the product, and now you want to go buy it. So let's go back into our integrations and configure our settings for the where to buy functionality. There are multiple commerce connectors available as different brands can use different providers. We have PriceSpider, SmartCommerce and CommerceConnector to start, so we'll choose CommerceConnector here and provide all of the appropriate credentials and some text for our call to action button and save the changes. We do need to clear caches, and then if we go back to our page, we can just refresh and that where to buy button should show up right on the page. And if we click it, we can see the list of retailers returned from CommerceConnector for that particular product ID. Now in this case it's just Amazon, but depending on the brand and location, this might include local retailers or supermarkets in addition to online shops like Amazon. The associations for them are set up by the brand with a provider and the integration module makes the connections and just adds it automatically to product detail pages. So those are a couple examples of functional integrations that help us build Mars brand sites. From a site building perspective, simplified theming is one thing that lets us get new sites built and launched so quickly with the starter kits. There's actually a shared theme that all of our sites use, but it's very configurable. So obviously all the imagery and assets will be different from site to site, but the theme itself allows us to set things like fonts, color palettes, and other stylistic elements. Let's take a look at that. So here on the home page we have our brand colors, mostly navy and orange. And to update these, we go to the theme configurator. We immediately see a lot of the options that are available to most themes. But we also have these color selectors that allow us to have quite a bit of control over the colors that a theme uses. For instance, we can change this site-wide secondary color to a brown. And then we can change the header to use a gradient from that brown color to a brighter orange instead of the standard Benz orange. And then we can change the footer from the standard navy color to, let's say, a nice purple. You can see there are other color settings here that are available for different components. And also font settings that allow us to choose different typefaces for different areas of the site, text spacing settings. There are also theme image settings. So in addition to being able to set colors to support each individual brand's identity, we can also include different default imagery for the theme, dividers, brand shapes, and borders. This, for example, is used to divide the main content area from the footer. And some brands might have just a simple line or a wave like this. Other brands might use a zigzag pattern. It's always a tricky line to walk between having a standard approach and allowing brands' individual identities to shine through. But these allowances for customization can really help with that. Social media icons. And then different products also need to be able to display different things on their product detail pages. For instance, Benz Original doesn't have any need for allergen info, but Snickers or something else with peanuts in it certainly might. So let's go ahead and save this page and see the changes. We'll refresh our page. And we can see now that the gradient was applied to the header. This component had its background color changed to a brown. This button's color was also changed. And finally, our footer has had its divider updated and is now this lovely shade of purple. You can also see that this is why we have actual designers choosing the color palettes. So now let's walk through the creation of a new page on the platform. We'll create a new campaign page which can have custom layouts of multiple components. And we're going to go at warp speed here. So we'll enter in the required fields, a title, an associated image that we'll pull from the Mars Lighthouse Dam and publish it. And then we're off to the races. You'll see that it's all driven by layout builder. So these components are exposed as Drupal blocks and we have a number of custom blocks available to choose from. So first we'll create a nice page header element here. Select an image and some color settings. And then we'll add a few freeform story blocks that let us choose alignment, image media, different header styles, background colors. We'll add another one here with some different header styles. Next we'll make a right aligned one with an image. And then one with some left aligned text because everybody appreciates symmetry. Do one more freeform block of text here. And then finally let's cap it off with a recipe feature. Among other configuration here we can select an entity reference to a recipe that's already in the system. And associate either the image from the recipe itself or a video or even a new image. Then we save our layout. And although it does still have some of the questionable colors that I changed in the theme, complete with a purple footer I believe, I do have all the layout and content that I wanted in my campaign published here and it was built very quickly. So speaking of theming, the process of working through the styling and theming of components for a complex Drupal platform is challenging. We have a lot of dedicated front-end developers who don't necessarily have experience with Drupal. Sometimes they're even wary of working with Drupal theming from past experiences but they do tend to be the most efficient at building styles. So we decided to use the emulsify design system which takes advantage of Storybook, a tool many front-end developers are familiar with and allows them to just focus on doing what they do best. It's actually been great because eliminating the requirement for a Drupal themer opens the door to a much wider set of front-end experts. It brings non-Drupal developers into the project and allows them to contribute. And it even allows us to bring in additional front-end teams without really needing to ramp them up on how the whole platform works since they can just jump in and do their work in Storybook and then have it translated to what we see on the site. You can see here an example of something that was built in Storybook and how it does translate into what you see on the actual website. We were very proud to be recognized alongside our partners at Mars for our work together on all these efforts this past year at Acquia Engage as winners of the 2021 Leader of the Pack Retail Engage Award for bringing consistency to Mars digital platforms while also achieving initial ROI of a 50% reduction in development time by assembling brand sites with the Starter Kit instead of building from scratch and a 40% reduction in ongoing maintenance costs across all sites on the platform. So as we said, the Starter Kit platform is designed to be a living thing and it continues to evolve. We've addressed the major issues that were initially raised before we made that shift to a platform approach. We have a consistent, fast track to getting new brand sites launched, in some cases just over a week. The ROI that we mentioned is impressive now and it should only improve with time. Drupal releases, security updates, code management, it's all managed one time and can be rolled out across the whole platform with ease. Although we haven't gone into it much here, ensuring repeatable and reliable code management, integration, and release processes were a big part of this effort. The sites all share structure and architecture, but they also provide a shared user journey. Although they look different and have that personality or brand individuality, there's a consistency to the user experience across the portfolio of sites that makes it easy for visitors to navigate each of them. We look forward to continuously enhancing the platform to make Mars digital experiences even more engaging as we roll new sites out for Mars Wrigley, Mars Foods, and other Mars brands in the future. Thanks very much for watching. If you have any questions or want to learn more, either about this project or our Drupal and Aquia expertise at EPAM, feel free to reach out to me, Seth Gregory, at EPAM.com. Thanks.