Most of our teams work on presenting customers with the right articles and all the important information as quickly and easily as possible. The Inspire team is more responsible for making customers aware of product ranges that do not have to be explicitly searched for. This also includes editorial content that appears, for example, on the home page or the shops' product range entry pages.

The merger of Otto Versand Netherlands (OBV) into the Southland Group presented the team with a particularly challenging task. As the empiriecom CMS is regarded by the shop operators as a central aspect of the empiriecom platform, the effort involved in the initial phase of the changeover is particularly high. The colleagues at Otto Netherlands had no previous experience with Drupal, as they were using a completely different system, so they had to be intensively trained from the outset. In addition, they had to communicate in a foreign language, which made it difficult to explain complex technical processes and which everyone had to get used to. With the planned go-live in January, the biggest effort for the team was successfully completed and Christian S. and Daniel responded quickly and efficiently to the ever decreasing number of CMS queries.

The migration of the empiriecom CMS for Lascana AT is also one of the team's current projects. Here, however, the effort was significantly less, the colleagues were already familiarised with Drupal and did not need any intensive training. The system deployment with a functional production environment and staging environment, including a preview of the front end, was successfully implemented for Lascana AT in a short space of time.

A roadmap is a plan for the future development of technologies and products.

On a product vision board, the team jointly records in detail what their product should be able to do, how this performance can be made possible and which target group should be addressed.
The focus of the Inspire team is not always on the customers who ultimately browse the online shop, but also on the editors who fill this shop with editorial content. The team is constantly working on optimising the CMS to ensure that the technical provision and implementation of features for editorial work is as efficient as possible.

After an extensive modernisation of the backend in Drupal, the team's long-term goals are primarily focused on resolving dependencies. Drupal and thus the empiriecom CMS should no longer function as an isolated solution and the Inspire team no longer wants to function as a self-contained solution, but rather support the empiriecom overall solution.
The focus here is on being a microservice architecture, which is currently not yet 100% the case. For example, an app cannot start unless there is a storefront file in Drupal. These dependencies on the functions of the other teams are to be gradually resolved in order to make the empiriecom product more flexible and more attractive on the third-party market.

The team has defined three building blocks for the continuous optimisation of the CMS:

- Building block 1 (personalisation/individualisation):
In a classic scenario, a CMS editor defines the position of an image, text and perhaps a video. These digital components are to be displayed on a certain page at a certain time and remain in this form until a change is made. But that's not all: the development should continue and, building on this basis, content should be offered that proves to be relevant for the customer.

For example, if a customer has recently browsed the fashion section of the online shop, they will be shown the latest trends on their next visit and not suggestions for garden furniture or technology. At this point, personalisation is already so advanced that collaboration with Team PACE is required.

- Building block 2 (Operation of Drupal):
One step towards easier and faster usability of a CMS is the generation of intuitively operable Drupal components, which editors can use to implement entire page sections quickly and in a visually appealing way. Instead of creating a specific design from the individual elements, predefined input masks are used. These are already mobile-optimised and take all device types into account.

- Building block 3 (discount/voucher functions):
Everyone is happy about vouchers or discount campaigns. These points also fall within the remit of the Inspire team.

The editors now have customer groups at their disposal to display the various offers. The Order team provides the information for this from its profile database.

For example, a distinction is currently made between new and existing customers and different offers are displayed according to their respective status.
It is even easier to differentiate between registered and non-registered customers or customers with and without an affinity for credit. For example, they are shown different product images.

However, it is important to bear in mind that there is a considerable difference between discount promotions in the display and discount functions in the shopping basket. The latter does not actually fall within the remit of the Inspire team. A lot of work is currently still being put into maintaining discount functions, but in the long term this is probably an offer that is too costly and time-consuming for the third-party market. In the long term, a new solution and implementation must be found.

These blocks are intended to provide a simple and structured way for clients to incorporate complex content and maintain the editorial content without difficulty. In addition, the focus is still on the customer journey, where the user experience is to be individualised and intensified by, for example, placing the right content to support purchases at the right point in the customer journey.

Above all, a good sense of humour and good communication skills are important for successful teamwork, as the team is in contact with a number of external contacts due to the many and varied areas of responsibility.
A good sense of visualisation and a good understanding of how online editors work with a CMS are very important, as the team works a lot on the front end.
In the backend area, knowledge of the Google Cloud, the G-Cloud connection, Kubernetes and Docker is an advantage, as this is very DevOps-heavy.

There would be a visual standstill on start or range entry pages, as no trends such as the integration of moving images could be followed. Technical development would simply not be able to take place.