Custom CMS Development and Intranet for Philips Consumer Lifestyle

Philips Consumer Lifestyle, a Dutch division of the multinational electronics giant Philips, manufactures and sells consumer electronics and accessories. The company was looking to replace their outdated content management system used as the foundation for the internal portal (intranet) of the Philips Pronto product team. This legacy CMS required advanced technical skills to manage it and obstructed the intranet management. The company’s goals were to facilitate content management for non-technical staff as well as make the CMS easily scalable.

To win the project, Iflexion’s team put together our best practices in intranet development and proposed a custom CMS based on an open-source technology. Such a custom-built solution would help to address Philips Consumer Lifestyle’s unique business processes and introduce a cost-efficiency element by taking license costs out of the equation. 

Iflexion split the custom CMS development into several phases that covered the full cycle of activities:

• Refining the customer’s initial requirements and shaping the vision for the future solution
• Developing, testing and implementing primary features, such as user management and meta-information management
• Delivering secondary features, such as forum integration, the examination module, file sharing, and custom content components
• Designing and implementing the UI, including HTML slicing

The key development phase was carried out in iterations, with the deliverables demoed to the customer incrementally to incorporate their feedback. Working on the project on Iflexion’s side were a project manager, a business analyst, a technical team lead, developers, and a QA specialist.

In just under one month, we released the first version of the intranet to the Philips Pronto team who could start getting used to the new portal immediately. In the following months, we refined the solution and introduced additional features before fully launching it live. The portal is available across browsers and can be easily scaled to accommodate more users as needed.  

The success of this solution earned us the next project with Philips, this time with their lighting controls division, Dynalite, which requested a similar content management system for themselves. The custom CMS components developed for the Philips Pronto team were effectively reused to minimize the total cost of ownership for the division.