Building a Scalable CMS and Integrated Asset Repository for Real-Time Business Intelligence

With more than 600,000 subscribers, a leading weather forecasting company is backed by a vast network of weather stations with 50,000 satellite systems. It offers subscription-based services through a wide range of web and mobile applications and delivers customizable real-time business intelligence to the agriculture, energy, weather, financial analytics and transportation markets.

Though expert analysis and timely dissemination are central to the customer experience, the client’s legacy content management system (CMS) and tech stack struggled to manage the ever-growing volume of analytical content. It struggled with inefficient content production and digital asset management (DAM), making it difficult to aggregate, repurpose and disseminate content across multiple platforms. Editors lacked a streamlined way to integrate external RSS feeds, crucial for sourcing industry news, enriching content and syndicating it across channels. To build new articles, they had to manually browse websites, log into their DAM system to search for relevant digital assets and copy and paste them, making the process time-consuming.

The company engaged Material to build a unified CMS platform for seamless access, governance and delivery of contextually relevant content and digital assets across multiple digital channels, from websites to legacy applications such as satellite receivers.

The new Drupal CMS cut article update times in half, enabling the client to shift from a 20-minute delay to real-time updates. The time required to create and publish articles dropped by 62% and 88% respectively, while cloning and repurposing content became 51% and 43% faster. Enhanced analytics dashboards provided valuable insights into publishing trends, top topics and contributor performance, significantly boosting editorial efficiency. Overall, the transformation delivered a scalable, organized and future-ready content management platform that empowers the client to rapidly respond to market opportunities and maintain its leadership in delivering actionable, real-time business intelligence.