Uniting Creativity with Consistency: The Villeroy and Boch Professional Portal

Villeroy & Boch has been manufacturing premium porcelain since 1748. Their 7,500 employees and 14 production sites worldwide serve 125 international markets.

When use of mobile devices grew, V&B saw the opportunity to serve tradespeople better by optimizing the Professional Portal for mobile devices. Additionally, they wanted to update the TYPO3 installation to benefit from improvements and tightened security, and they chose to bring the design in line with V&B’s design principles. V&B turned to b13 to tackle this challenging project.

The V&B Professional Portal

Tens of thousands of tradespeople across the world install V&B products, and when they need detailed information such as installation instructions, they turn to the V&B Professional Portal. The Portal not only enables them to access information, but organize it too: it offers a login area where tradespeople can bookmark favourite content and create personal lists for each of their clients. This makes them more effective and enables them to deliver the quality that V&B is renowned for.

Consistent Appearance and Optimized Performance

Jens Kelch, Digital Art Manager and member of V&B’s Corporate Online Unit, led the project. “Our IT department recommended b13 because they have TYPO3 core developers in their team,” he explains.

A challenge in any project, especially in large enterprises such as V&B, is empowering editors while ensuring brand consistency across the organization. Jens is satisfied that the new portal strikes the right balance between the two, with modular page designs and redesigned page types. “This was a massive benefit for the entire user experience,” says Jens.

Jens also explains how b13 optimized the backend: “b13 gave us cleaner code and cut out unnecessary functions so it runs faster.” This speed keeps busy plumbers happier while consulting the app on the job.

Updating the TYPO3 version and rebuilding the front and backend are all very well, but when you’re migrating over 10,000 pieces of content in nine languages, doing so by hand would cost staff hundreds or thousands of hours. b13 tailored an automated migration script to minimize the amount of editor intervention required, consequently saving massive amounts of internal resources. Despite the significant architectural changes, the migration ran smoothly and enabled staff to concentrate on their core tasks.

Robust Processes for Current and Future Efficiency

Since the new Professional Portal went online, tradespeople have enjoyed a snappier, mobile-optimized portal with an attractive and intuitive design when they’re on the job. This is no doubt an additional incentive for them to choose V&B’s products as it enhances the overall experience.

b13’s systematic approach to design implementation help V&B apply their look and feel consistently, even on projects where b13 aren’t directly involved. Jens is impressed: “This kind of work is now standard for us—our new processes are based on what we’ve learned from b13,” he reveals. “CMSs can get in the way of designers, but b13 freed us to deliver a user experience without limitations.”

Editors across the world now have the creative freedom they require to deliver the V&B design principles consistently.

At b13, we do TYPO3 work the "right" way. We set up all projects with proper version control and work with the CMS rather than against it. We weed out hacks and workarounds from existing projects. The benefits of our approach include smooth security updates.

Our team and the approach we take seem to have gone down well with V&B: “b13 are a young, big team. They’re friendly and working together is a lot of fun. We worked together as equals the whole way.”

The pleasure was all ours!