A Headless Web Platform for A Global Pharmaceutical Company

The client’s enterprise web landscape for product sites in the US was fragmented across multiple platforms with widely divergent approaches and capabilities, each of which carried varying degrees of technical debt. This led to frequent uncertainties when estimating level of effort and time to market for new properties. With no unified technology platform to provide a standardized approach, updates across hundreds of these cross-portfolio websites became unsustainably costly and time consuming. Furthermore, these unique, brand-specific website implementations led to a lack of sufficient governance and coordination to ensure that best practices like web accessibility, performance, and data security were met. Finally, the lack of a centralized design system meant that retaining consistency in look-and-feel across the entire portfolio of sites posed a serious challenge. A single enterprise technology platform was needed to provide a true next-generation web feature set across its site portfolio while benefiting from economies of scale and a unified approach.  

The client wanted this platform to reflect a headless CMS approach in support of the organization’s broader omni-channel publishing efforts, leading EPAM to take an API-first approach to its architecture. The client worked with a third-party agency to develop a design system and wanted the web platform to function as a translation layer for this design system, bringing it from Figma into Drupal via API calls to the front end. Drupal provided a perfect solution for these requirements and its ability to structure content via Layout Builder with component “blocks” allowed it to serve as an ideal “Rosetta Stone” for the design system structure.  

Upon completion of this new unified platform, a rapid onboarding process was initiated to migrate US pharmaceutical brands, and within its first year of operation more than 125 websites were launched on the new platform.  This streamlined process enabled the client to leapfrog ahead of its prior state, enhancing user experience and platform performance, while also fundamentally improving user engagement by enabling a path to easily deploy new shared functionality including personalization and other MarTech stack integrations. A comprehensive caching strategy, including carefully tuned Cloudflare CDN rules improved performance, reduced unnecessary load on servers, and resulted in significantly reduced operational costs.  

These gains in performance and stability were put to the ultimate test when the platform was activated as part of a Super Bowl advertising campaign. Advance load testing allayed any fears the business had by confirming that the site would remain stable and performant - even under a load of 1 million users - and this was proven out by a successful campaign, serviced by the new Drupal platform without incident. 

EPAM has been an invaluable partner during the work, ensuring appropriate expertise was always available to help us accelerate. As a result of their partnership and high-quality work, we have been able to meet our timelines and product expectations, as well as demonstrate the power of working as one agile team to the rest of the organization.
Client Product Owner.