Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) streamlines innovation and reduces complexity

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) is a thought leader in the power industry, as well as a manufacturer and distributor of thousands of products across power generation, transmission, communication, security and more. Customers visit the SEL website to access and learn about digital products and systems that protect, control and automate power systems around the world. 

Before adopting Contentstack, SEL had been relying on a Content Management System (CMS) that was suitable for a medium-sized company, but as the business scaled, they found they had outgrown what their previous CMS was capable of. With customers in 171 countries, and five languages to serve, SEL’s technology stack needed modernization.

“Before we even really knew what headless was, we ended up building a homegrown headless solution around our existing CMS,” Brian Dorgan, Engineering Manager with Information Services, said. “We could see the power it had to decouple front-end designs and how we could present data, and we knew it could help us to be nimble and craft the site the way we wanted to for our customers.” 

However, on a patchwork homegrown CMS, the potential was limited. “We had to use a lot of workarounds to get it to do what we needed it to do,” Dorgan said. “It didn’t have feature updates, it was hard for the content editors to use, and it was taking a lot of effort for developers every time there was a new type of content required.”

Expansion was a core goal for SEL, as well as simplifying and streamlining content management for marketing and development teams. 

Contentstack’s headless CMS was chosen as the main content hub for SEL’s public-facing website, and now powers SEL information and documentation, and the literature customers need for their products and services. As well as serving as a knowledge hub, SEL is also a community of users. With a stronger technical backbone in place, the resources hosted on the website are now an extension and reflection of the company’s customer care promise, allowing the business to foster loyalty, trust and reliability in the products and services they provide. 

Since adopting Contentstack, SEL has simplified the way content is managed across the business. “Editors find it easier to search for and find the content they are trying to edit, and we can use links in the review version to go straight to Contentstack and make those changes directly and at speed,“ Dorgan said. “Search is so much better than it was with our old CMS. When we have a lot of changes to make, it all happens so much faster, and it’s been a real asset to our process.”

Within Contentstack, SEL has created a unique content template called a page builder, which uses Modular Blocks and Global Fields to generalize how pages are built. “Without building a new content type for every kind of new page, marketing can dynamically create a new page without being restricted in design,” Dorgan said. “Previously, any changes to add new fields or new types of content required Information Services to edit those features, and developers to work on back-end code. Now we can skip our involvement unless something is more complicated. We’ve given marketing autonomy to do what they need to do.”

Effective localization was also an important goal for SEL, and one differentiator of the Contentstack platform was the ability to use non-standard terms. Mistranslations erode customer trust and business legitimacy, and Contentstack’s webhooks capabilities have allowed SEL to build an intelligent and streamlined workflow to empower human translators across all languages.

SEL has found a strategic partner in Contentstack, and has been able to embrace innovation as a core value, with the technology in place to scale and optimize performance. The team is looking forward to being more nimble in creating new content, with the confidence that the architecture is in place for success. 

Key wins for SEL with Contentstack include:

• Simplified content management: Marketers and developers can focus on their core workload, without content administration slowing them down. 
• A centralized content hub: All marketing content for the SEL website is now powered by Contentstack, streamlining search, content creation and delivery. 
• Strategic vendor partnership: SEL has built a strong partnership with the Contentstack team, opening a channel for troubleshooting and growth.