Case Study: BHP website upgrade pivotal to improving speed to market, usability

BHP as a company has undergone some significant transformations as a business in the last 18 months, reflecting changes in commodities markets and long-term shifts in consumption in a global economy that is growing and decarbonising.

For instance, according to Michael Eva, group digital communications and content manager, BHP, “We announced the sanctioning of our potash mine in Canada, which when its in operation will be one of the largest potash mines in the world. This will produce sustainable fertiliser, which is critical for global food production. Then we've got nickel, which goes into EVs, and we've got copper, which is just fundamental for every electronic device in the world.”

He said that given the organisation is undergoing a transformation, it was important that the company’s web presence was reflective of the shift in the business. The current site has been live since 2016 and was built on an older version of Sitecore.

“We were starting to feel like it wasn't as representative and reflective of this dynamic changing business of BHP.”

Eva and his team started to run into the kinds of problems that will be familiar to many digital leaders with ageing websites. “As websites develop the information architecture can become more bloated. It becomes trickier for people to find the content that they need.”

Given the site is the primary communications channel for the business, a decision was made to upgrade it, and at the same time to move to the newer version of Sitecore.

“The rationale was really around ensuring that the website was as usable as possible so people could find the information they needed as quickly as possible.”

One of the advantages of the new approaches is that it makes it easier for BHP to make changes more rapidly.

Eva said, “There was absolutely a speed-to-market concern. When our website is not just an information channel, it's also where we publish all of our regulatory documents and there's a regulatory requirement and governance requirement around getting those documents on the site and we aim to do that as quickly as possible.

"We aim for the website to be the single source of truth, the information around BHP so ensuring that we can do that quickly and easily is really important.”

The newer version of the software made that easier, Eva said, adding there was a beautiful consistency between the different versions, which made it easier to upskill to the new platform. With those new skills in place, the web team was able to operate more dynamically.

“The way Sitecore is structured and the way we are able to leverage some of the new functionality to build the website as a series of components enables us to have more flexibility when it comes to building the pages.”

For a business like BHP, regulatory compliance is a critical issue when publishing to the web, which is also a strength of the new approach.

“Workflows are absolutely fundamental to ensuring that we can have a range of different publishers in that system with a range of different administrative admin rights, and to ensure that content is going through the appropriate workflows, and that we have good governance and compliance. 

He told Digital Nation Australia, “We can't afford to have content go onto the website when it's not ready to be on the website. There's materiality and disclosure of risks.”

The upgrade also involved changes in infrastructure.

“There was an amazing collaboration between the Accenture team and our internal cloud team to build that new infrastructure – building it within BHP's cloud tenets from a number of perspectives including cloud security.”

Accenture was the delivery partner for the project, with Avanade (an Accenture company) also involved in the design and build.

Eva said, “They were critical partners in ensuring best practice was adhered to both from a user experience and content perspective right through to them the technical terms of delivery."

Eva flagged release automation and improved user experience as other advantages of the new site.

“We were very focused on the user experience gains. So there are absolutely productivity gains that we got from a development perspective," he ended.