Case Study: A Web Platform for the Largest Swiss Professional Championship
In cooperation with over 60 national professional associations, SwissSkills enables young professionals to participate in national and international professional championships (WorldSkills or EuroSkills). SwissSkills thus promotes young talents, makes them visible in the media and thus ambassadors of the Swiss professional education system.
At the center of the new user experience was a profession and competition search, which allows visitors to search for professions and competitions in the newly built database of SwissSkills or to filter them as desired. During 3 months, in 3 sprints, a multilingual, multisite capable and very flexible solution was designed, which the customer could compile and fill via modules during the development.
Customer Details
Challenge
A huge challenge and even bigger, historically grown database
SwissSkills approached us right at the beginning with a number of very interesting challenges in a first call. And also afterwards, it became clear that the customer had done his homework and that we could build the new solution on the basis of a state-of-the-art "pre-analysis". Above all, the historically grown database was to be cleared out, so that in the future SwissSkills could aggregate the professional profiles, competitions efficiently and without redundancies with, among other things, participant data and event information. A user-centric experience was then to be created on this basis.
"Finally, we can present the complex construct of our organization and our different projects in an attractive way. We have a flexible system with a clean database. Despite time pressure, this demanding project was always characterized by great mutual respect. A great basis of trust and technical foundation for the future was created."
Roland Hirsbrunner, Head of Marketing & Communication, SwissSkills
Solution
He who seeks correctly shall find! But only if the data basis is accurate.
Thanks to the newly created, centrally organized database and the use of an Algolia search (external interface), we were also able to implement an advanced search algorithm. The error tolerance developed individually for the customer ensures that the user is actually offered the search result he expects. In this project, we were also able to take advantage of the complete bandwidth of the Pimcore platform. SwissSkills, for example, maintains all its media in Pimcore (DAM), manages its event pages independently and in 3 languages on separate subdomains (multisite capability / multilingualism) and publishes its news automatically via the connection of over 300 different social media sources (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Vimeo).
"Thanks to the numerous, flexible possibilities that Pimcore offers us, we were not only able to fully meet the customer's requirements in this project, we were even able to exceed them. So much so that we are now talking about continuing the collaboration. These possibilities for customer loyalty have become the decisive success factor for us as an agency."
Sandro Jenny, Project Manager, w-vision
Results
Flexible, more flexible, Pimcore!
Since the customer had a clear idea not only in terms of content, but also with regard to the timely communication of the new platform, we divided the project into three sprints, which enabled us to implement the complex requirements function-by-function, module-by-module in parallel with the development. In order for the customer to be able to capture its content in parallel with the development, we implemented a multi-level module concept based on the customer's very comprehensive CI/CD documentation. SwissSkills can therefore, to name just one example, independently choose which color concept the modules can be displayed in. Using the import bundle "Import-Definitions" developed by us, we were able to import all object data (professions, competitions, participant profiles) in multiple languages. Maximum flexibility for the customer, a new, clean database combined with modern user experience.