Mitsui Chemicals is a Japanese chemicals manufacturer that provides products and services to enrich people's lives across a wide range of fields, including automobiles, electronics and information, health and medical care, packaging, agriculture, building and building materials, and environmental energy.
The company's proportion of overseas sales, which was 17% at the time of its founding in 1997, increased to 44% by FY 2017. Looking to become a chemical group with a global presence and pushing forward with further overseas expansion, there was an urgent need for its website to foster a sense of trust and expectation throughout the group, while also establishing a platform to deliver appropriate information to local stakeholders tailored to each country’s particular circumstances.
Consequently, in 2018, Mitsui Chemicals rebuilt its website’s operating environment and content management system with support from Digital Circus. Adopting Drupal as a content management platform for the multiple websites that Mitsui Chemicals operates in each country, including Japan, Germany, Singapore and China, the site was renewed with a responsive new design.
◎Why Drupal was chosen
・Multi-site / Multilingual Support
Drupal was selected as a CMS that can manage different domains and groups of sites with multiple languages on a single platform. Using the multi-site and multilingual features that Drupal is equipped with as standard, sites in Asia, Europe and elsewhere can be managed centrally through shared infrastructure and applications.
・Extensibility
Drupal was highly regarded for its robust architecture and flexible extensibility for managing unique contents on the website for each country while applying common design guidelines across the group. A new content management platform needs to achieve both unified web governance and the uniqueness of each country’s site, and Drupal was selected in consideration of its extensibility, which includes the ability to customize it.
・Security
Within the Drupal community, which is participated in and run by a large number of developers from around the world, a highly specialized security team releases security patches and version upgrades on a regular basis, while its timely provision of information allows websites to be operated with peace of mind.
◎Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome)
・Review and reconstruction of the information transmission infrastructure
We built an information transmission infrastructure that quickly distributes global press releases and announcements to every country as a function of the content management platforms. We made it such that the process of content registration, translation, approval and distribution can be performed using a common CMS.
・Reconstruction of unified web governance
We carried out a renovation of the site using a globally unified design template, based on the newly formulated design guidelines. By using the Drupal rights management feature to configure fine-grained permission settings for the in-site editing area, the supervisors in charge of operating each country’s website can carry out content management tailored for that country while abiding by the design guidelines.
◎Main modules used
・Workflow
Using Workflow and Content Moderation, we implemented a flexible yet robust content approval process.
・Paragraphs
By implementing the necessary datasets for each content type in Paragraphs, content editors were able to create pages efficiently when producing content.
・RESTful Web Services
The system for delivering common global content to each country’s site was built by extending RESTful Web Services. This enables content, categories, image files, etc. to be transmitted from the sending to the receiving site with a simple operation on the management page.
・Media/ Media Entity Browser
Media was used to build the system for sharing and re-using the images and PDF files used on the site. Additionally, using Media Entity Browser in conjunction with the Media module made it simple to insert files from the content entry page.
