Unlocking Success: How Operational KPIs Can Transform Your Business Through Effective Platform Implementation

When companies embark on redesigning or re-platforming their public-facing websites, the stated goals and measures of success are often customer-facing KPIs—things like page views, newsletter signups, lead generation, and other conversions. While these metrics are crucial for enhancing your digital presence, the often-overlooked operational KPIs can have an equally significant impact on your business. As you plan your project, it’s essential to optimize your internal systems to minimize overhead and reduce the burden on your resources.

Key Takeaways

1. Enterprise customer experience platforms offer more than just the ability to create a beautiful product for your customers, they can have a material impact on your businesses' bottom line. When implementing your systems, make sure you understand how to optimize their features to maximize your investment.

2. Adobe’s suite of products has built in tools to help improve content velocity, security and system monitoring, platform upgrade processes and dynamically connected systems - all of which drastically reduce the overhead and manpower required from your technical resources. When your systems can carry this load, you free up time for your resources to focus on more strategic and higher-value projects.

3. A key part of Rightpoint’s discovery process is to understand your business operations and application owners and users to customize the tools to work for you.

Understanding Operational KPIs: Maximizing Efficiency and ROI

The right tool set plus the right implementation approach can quickly and effectively overhaul your business operations processes. When you architect your application around maximizing your employee’s efficiency, you will speed up the time to recognize your ROI. The main operational KPI’s we’ll look at in this article are:

1. Content velocity

2. Application maintainability

3. Resource bandwidth

Content Velocity with Adobe Experience Manager

Marketers and content strategists should be able to build landing pages and update website content without the need for development support, or reliance on a code deployment. Most content management systems provide an intuitive user interface to support ease of content creation.

Some of Adobe Experience Manager’s (AEM) core features do just that:

• AEM components: Built with the content author in mind, AEM’s core components allow non-technical users to create and update pages with ease. A visual editor allows you to see how your work will look on a page as you go, and the intuitive drag-and-drop UI makes it easy to customize pages based on your content needs.

• Editable templates: With the ability to quickly setup pre-defined layouts, application owners help their users save time when creating pages with repeated formatting like blog articles, product pages or press releases.

• User groups: Permission based user groups make it so you can easily enforce content governance and help specific author groups know exactly where to go to edit their content.

• Optimized content structure: Templates and components enable SEO friendly content - editable metadata and structured content schemas make optimizing your pages a native part of the process, not an extra step.

Content Velocity in Action

A Rightpoint client in the industrial manufacturing sector experienced a significant boost in content velocity after implementing AEM. Content marketers were able to create pages in minutes, a task that previously took days or even weeks, and no longer had to rely on development support or code releases. Additionally, they successfully migrated over 3,000 pages of content in just a few weeks, thanks to the use of predefined templates.

Application Maintainability with AEM

A common overhead I often see with clients is the expense of redundant platform licenses and the recurring cost of bi-annual upgrade projects—or worse, the ongoing challenge of managing outdated tech when upgrades are deprioritized during budget reviews.

These costs can be significantly reduced by implementing AEM, which offers built-in security features, an automated upgrade process, dynamic integrations, and powerful multi-site management capabilities.

• Automatic updates and patches: Adobe manages all software updates, security patches, and maintenance tasks. This reduces the need for internal IT teams to spend time and resources managing upgrades, ensuring the platform is always up to date without additional labor costs.

• Managed services: AEM as a Cloud Service includes operational monitoring, backups, and disaster recovery built-in, reducing the need for a dedicated team to manage these functions.

• Number of product licenses: If your company manages multiple web properties, AEM allows you to consolidate them all on a single platform. This reduction in license redundancy not only cuts down on costs but also enables your teams to share a unified component and template library, digital asset repository, and much more.

• Dynamically connected systems: Adobe’s suite of products all natively connect to each other, making your content supply chain a single, streamlined system.

Real-World Example: Application Maintainability

A Rightpoint client in the digital technology sector achieved greater efficiency by integrating Workfront and AEM DAM for asset reviews, approvals, storage, and usage. This integration resulted in:

• A centralized location for all digital assets

• Streamlined and optimized workflows

• A fully integrated technology stack

Additionally, they enhanced their system security with over 50% code coverage, incorporating built-in unit testing and code scanning. These improvements made it easier to assess the overall health of the codebase and bolstered site security. By consolidating their digital assets in AEM Assets, they also saw a 10% improvement in website page load times.

Adobe Experience Manager and Resource Bandwidth

With a cloud hosted solution, many resources whose jobs previously revolved around application monitoring and upkeep are now free to take on more initiatives.

• No on-premises hardware: AEM as a Cloud Service eliminates the need for maintaining physical infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking hardware. Adobe handles all infrastructure, which reduces the need for costly upfront investments and ongoing maintenance.

• Constant Monitoring and Security Updates: Adobe’s cloud infrastructure is continuously monitored for security threats, and automated security patches are deployed to mitigate risks without manual intervention. This proactive approach reduces the risk of security breaches.

• Security Audits and Reports: Adobe provides audit trails and security reporting capabilities, allowing businesses to track user activities and access patterns to ensure compliance and prevent internal threats.

Real-World Impact: Resource Bandwidth with AEM’s Cloud Hosting

A Rightpoint client in the digital technology sector was able to reallocate a significant portion of their marketing budget due to the reduced overhead provided by AEM's cloud-hosted solution:

• Automatic AEM updates eliminate the need for costly version upgrades every 2 to 3 years, allowing the business to focus on core operations.

• AEM as a Cloud Service removed the requirement for 2-3 AEM Engineers to manage site servers and security, saving approximately 20 hours per month per engineer, totaling 500-720 hours annually.

• Additionally, developers no longer need to perform tasks like compaction and reindexing, freeing up an estimated 5 hours per week for more valuable work.

Partner with Rightpoint to ensure your next implementation maximizes your operational KPI’s

If you are in the process of a redesign or replatform, reach out to see how we can help improve both your website and employee experience.