Precision Administration Services Pty Ltd (Sunsuper) is a leading Australian Superannuation Fund based in Brisbane, Australia. As one of Australia’s biggest and fastest growing profit-for-members super funds, with 1.3 million members and $58 billion in funds under management, Sunsuper’s purpose is to ‘inspire and empower Australian’s to fulfil their retirement dreams’.
Driven by the need to evolve into one of Australia’s most innovative, data-driven, digital businesses, in around 2016 Sunsuper invested in a number of new technologies a part of the most significant digital transformation program in the company’s history. The intention of their Sitecore investment was to give the fund a platform to acquire and nurture new and existing customers through the website, as well as consolidating a number of other marketing investments onto a common platform.
The Stack
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Sitecore 9 (XP1)
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Microsoft Azure PaaS
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Microsoft Azure Search
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Azure VSTS
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Dataweavers
Bringing together people, process and technology
By 2018, the Sitecore implementation was escalating in operational costs and falling short of their intended goals of doing more with the Sitecore platform across the business. To address this, Sunsuper identified the need to unlock the full Sitecore feature set by upgrading from version 8 to 9, reduce the growing on-premise hosting costs, increase project deployment speed and decrease down-time. With aggressive timelines in mind, Sunsuper engaged with Triggerfish to help.
Sitecore 8 to 9 in 90 days
The upgrade included major architecture changes including code and configuration to build multiple Azure PaaS environments to scale and optimise project delivery, both for volume of projects in flight, and velocity of delivery.
The environments are secure, scripted and repeatable – optimising the platform infrastructure for tighter project delivery timelines. The platform also allows for automated project approval and deployment processes across the Digital, IT and Marketing teams – all aligned to Sunsuper’s internal financial services security and change management processes.
Sunsuper now have an entirely cloud-based Sitecore implementation. Migrating Sunsuper from their physical, on-premise data centre to Microsoft Azure PaaS has saved the organisation more than 70% of ongoing monthly hosting costs.
Secure and automated to do more marketing
The Marketing team now have access to the full feature set of Sitecore 9.0.2. The team can take advantage of the new Sitecore 9 forms, analytics, accurate and integrated reporting, and secure data storage. The team can now design and deliver campaigns faster, increasing speed to market and serving an improved customer experience across both online and offline platforms.
With the ability to personalise and use progressive profiling, Sunsuper now have the ability to create a full customer acquisition lead funnel for the 70,000+ users per month. Members, Employers and Advisers visiting the site now receive a better customer experience with easy-to-find, self-service functionality, together with fast page load times that have been reduced from 4 seconds to under 1 second.
Once a project is approved, the automated project deployment process has been reduced from 8 hours to just 1 hour. The teams are no longer forced into a linear, one-at-a-time project pipeline, but are running multiple projects concurrently for faster, more confident delivery without the previous infrastructure hurdles and bottlenecks.
Renewed confidence
The engagement with the Triggerfish team has renewed Sunsuper’s confidence in the Sitecore platform across the IT, Digital and Marketing teams. The organisation now has a good foundation for continuous optimisation of the Sitecore platform into the future, which can also take advantage of future Sitecore upgrades immediately after they are released – avoiding the all too familiar and dreaded ‘upgrade-not-possible’.
The Journey
Job to be done
- Sitecore Blueprint
- Readiness Assessment
- Marketing Tech & xDB
- Information Architecture
Planning for outcomes
- PaaS code configuration
- Migration Stages
- DevOps plan
- Roles & Dependencies
Building for the future
- Build Environments
- Scripted & repeatable
- Connect DevOps
- Test & refine
Go-live
- Onsite go-live support
- Deployment & testing
- DNS changes & cutover
- Monitoring & sign-off
Review & reflect
- Handover
- As-built documentation