Austrade Website Solution Case Study

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The Australian Trade Commission (Austrade) is the government agency that helps Australian businesses to succeed in international trade and investment. Austrade operates in over 100 locations worldwide.

The Challenge

Elcom had previously worked with Austrade on its Business Club Australia website, and due to the successful management of this initiative, was invited to tender for its revised principal website and connecting portals.

Due to the geographically dispersed nature of Austrade’s global operating locations, the requirements for this new project were of a much larger scale and involved a very specific set of criteria.

Overall, Austrade required a complete content management platform from which it could launch its main site, in conjunction with existing and future satellite sites. This platform also needed to be flexible enough to allow the information architecture to each individual site to differ.

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The features of the Elcom platform have really enhanced our user experience and continue to provide many efficiencies. It is easy to use and this new version has everything we need to power our website. Elcom's can-do attitude has helped us achieve our goals. Edwin Kuller, Manager - Platforms (Digital) team
Austrade

Austrade Website Three Devices Image 1200px

The Solution

With over 5 years of experience working with Austrade and two previous successful tender wins, Elcom’s approach to finding the optimum solution involved conducting complex user and system analysis which were then actioned using strict project methodologies.

Elcom’s preliminary analysis focused on Austrade’s existing system and worked to identify the features which they needed integrated into the new system.

This process also involved conducting a range of usability focus sessions, whereby the results were incorporated into Austrade’s full list of functional requirements; such as the need for an events management functionality, multilingual-site capability and maps integration.

From here it was concluded that the most appropriate all-encompassing solution came in the form of Elcom a powerfully simple base platform.

Elcom worked closely with Austrade’s Web Team to implement the new WCMS and migrate over 20,000 content assets.

The new Austrade Web Content Management System (WCMS) had the following capabilities:

A Learning Management System (LMS) – allowing the creation of online learning modules for export market training.
A powerfully simple publishing engine – for creating content, media releases, podcasts and rich media.
Events Management - integrated with the CRM system which incorporated processes to create and promote events whilst managing the logistics, online/offline registrations and tracking.
Multi-Site Management – for numerous international websites, with the option of partially delegating responsibility for those sites whilst maintaining centralised administration and support.
Integration with Austrade’s business systems – including the ability integrate with payment gateways.
Multilingual sites – involving compliance with Unicode Standard to allow multilingual content management.
Maps integration – which included a centralised database of office locations and opening times that could be easily searched and presented to end users, potential investors or exporters.
Content alerts - which allowed users and administrators to receive alerts based on taxonomy or when new content is developed or modified. target customers with relevant content, email campaigns
Membership Segmentation - in order to more effectively and site personalisation.

The Benefits

As a result of implementing Elcom, Austrade experienced the following business benefits:

More efficient and flexible production and management of content.
Simple management of multiple sites with the ability to easily create new and distinctive sites.
Greater information accessibility.
Enhanced event management and promotion capabilities.
Improved customer satisfaction through personalisation
A stable, scalable and secure platform which can be easily extended and integrated into internal systems.
Improved document management and control.
Reduced costs due to a single consolidated web platform for the multiple websites.
Ability to leverage the investment in the Elcom platform, and provide new functionality such as mobile device access and social media engagement capability.

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visit austrade.gov.au or see more case studies