The Dulux Group’s subsidiary, Parchem, produces and sells industrial and building materials to Australia’s burgeoning building sector. One of their licensed brands, FOSROC, is a leading international manufacturer and supplier of high performance chemicals for the construction industry, with a particular focus on concrete and cement products.

Operating with largely traditional marketing and sales strategies, Parchem sought to undergo a digital transformation to reduce the costs of doing business. Their key strategy was to develop a strong Australian presence for the FOSROC brand while also providing customers with online tools to purchase products and better engage with Parchem’s product experts.

Newpath’s innovation and design team worked closely with Parchem’s marketing department to distil their ideas and needs leveraging a human-centered approach. Beyond business analysis, we ran a series of design thinking workshops with subject matter experts to generate innovative ideas in a collaborative environment.

Newpath’s goal was to build an engaging online brand experience clearly representing FOSROC’s market position. Parchem was also keen to move away from using costly CMS technologies that were difficult to manage even small changes without engaging developers. We chose a decoupled Drupal CMS environment in order to achieve the flexibility, scalable and extensible solution Parchem desired.

Many of their internal sales and marketing functions centred around maintenance of the product catalogue. With this in mind, we needed to enable these departments by streamlining the management of the product catalogue, including image assets, technical data sheets, description information, and related products. As it stood, there was a lot of double handling of product spreadsheets, datasheets and imagery.

By introducing a strong online experience with quote building and e-commerce capabilities, both customers and the FOSROC sales team would be better equipped to transact in a fast, low friction manner. Personalising this experience would be a key strategy to developing positive customer experiences.

Leveraging our proven innovation sprint methodology, we engaged Parchem’s marketing and product management teams in collaborative rapid prototyping and discovery workshops in order to a) quickly scope their needs, b) gain insights from their brand experts, and c) ideate online features and processes that would meet their strategic objectives.

Our design team then took these ideas and distilled them into interactive prototypes for the Parchem team to both validate with key senior stakeholders and key clients. Once our concepts were validated, we set out to build a development roadmap that would enable us to launch the website quickly (with a first phase delivered live within 6 months).

In order to create a fast path to delivery, Newpath devised a multi-phased roadmap that would see us create the product catalogue, headless functions, e-commerce, customer account management, a unique quote builder feature, and price estimation tools over an 18-month period. During this time, sample audiences would be able to test design prototypes of each feature to validate our designed solutions. In this manner, we used a ‘build – test – measure’ or ‘LEAN’ methodology.

As a result of our go-to-market strategy, Parchem is able to cost-effectively and quickly validate every released feature with their customer base. More than just a handsome website, the decoupled headless Drupal CMS will further streamline their product management and customer engagement processes, significantly reducing sales and marketing costs. With time saved on these processes, Parchem’s teams will be free to focus on servicing and communicating with clients, improving customer experiences.

Our fantastic partnership with the team at Parchem has produced an industry-leading online brand experience that has been well-received by their growing customer base.