Tikkurila – From fragmented to seamless digital presence

What is PPG Tikkurila?

PPG Tikkurila is a Nordic paint company whose products are manufactured of carefully chosen raw materials that meet the highest quality standards. Tikkurila’s vision is to create surfaces that make a difference. Tikkurila has three core premium brands in decorative paints: Tikkurila, Alcro, and Beckers. In addition, there are several local painting brands in European markets: Vivacolor, Jedynka, and Polifarb.

Objectives

When PPG Tikkurila began searching for a new digital partner, they highlighted their wish to shift the focus from technical projects to building a customer-centric experience. They were looking for a partner that shared their vision and could provide a business-oriented development process, with a clear emphasis on achieving measurable business benefits and being truly focused on meeting end-users’ needs.

Top-quality painting brands need to be communicated in a highly visual and inspirational manner. That demanded professional digital services designing skills, an understanding of the optimal user journeys, UX/UI prototyping for particular services, or further planning of the technical architecture. At the beginning of the new partnership, there was a need to tackle a stretched backlog of development needs.

The roots of Tikkurila company date back to 1862 when Tikkurila was founded. What started out as a small Finnish oil press, then grew over time into a leading Nordic paint company. PPG Tikkurila was born in 2021 when the Tikkurila company merged with PPG Corporation.

PPG Corporation is a global supplier of paints and coatings. PPG serves customers with 50,000 employees and operations in 75 countries. PPG is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, and is a Fortune 500 company.

Digital services have several user segments (consumer households, professional painters, construction industry) and several product brands (Alcro, Beckers, Tikkurila, Vivacolor, Jedynka, Polifarb) and several sales areas around Europe (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Kazakhstan).

PPG Tikkurila faced a challenge with its digital landscape spread across multiple websites for different brands and languages. They recognized the need for a partner to help take their online services to the next level from both a business and end-user perspective.

Wunder was selected as a partner to address this challenge and began working closely with PPG Tikkurila in 2022. The partnership involves active digital development and creative design that reflects the company’s brand values and helps drive business growth. The goal is to provide PPG Tikkurila’s customer segments with an exceptional online experience, bringing together their various brands and language versions into a seamless and intuitive user experience.

On top of that, the multi-site situation had caused gaps in security and slowed down further development of the services. Therefore it was important for the new partner to have strong knowledge of infrastructure architecture to administer all PPG Tikkurila brand websites.

Tikkurila partnered with Wunder to enhance its web infrastructure. The process began with an audit of the existing web services, identifying areas for improvement.

Tikkurila has been utilizing Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform for several years. Wunder proposed implementing its Silta Continuous Delivery Platform to optimize the development and deployment workflows. By integrating Wunder’s Siltaopens-in-a-new-tab with Tikkurila’s existing Microsoft Azure infrastructure, the company experienced improvements in security, efficiency, and cost reduction within its cloud operations.

Unifying the codebases of the PPG Tikkurila brand sites, core updates and Drupal 8 to 9 migration improved features and security. Code refactoring optimized performance and maintainability.

Thanks to this collaboration, PPG Tikkurila has undergone a remarkable transformation of its web services infrastructure. Now, they have a top-notch setup, benefiting from optimized hosting, up-to-date Drupal, refined code, and unified architecture. This has resulted in improved performance, enhanced security, and increased scalability.

Furthermore, our team at Wunder has developed data export functionality from Tikkurila’s product management system (PIM), enhancing integration and streamlining processes. To ensure consistency, a unified language setup has been implemented across the various country-specific websites.

The collaboration between Tikkurila and Wunder has led to better communication between the client, designers and developers, thus developing transparency and resulting in improved customer experience. The partnership also has addressed previous challenges, such as the lack of consultation on end-user experience and roadmap building.