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TAKEDA: $29B COMPANY RUNS DIGITAL ON STACKBIT

Sep 15, 2022

Takeda Pharmaceuticals uses Stackbit so a small dev team can power 80 different
websites in dozens of countries while shipping new internal apps 4 times faster.


TAKEDA PHARMACEUTICALS

With $29+ billion in annual revenue, Takeda Pharmaceuticals is the largest
pharmaceutical company in Asia and one of the top 10 pharma companies in the
world. Takeda based its new digital content architecture on Stackbit. As a
result, a small in-house team efficiently powers 80 different websites–including
the main corporate website that serves 4m unique visitors every quarter–and
ships new apps to their employees 4x faster than before.

> Stackbit was 100% the key to our success and was the critical ingredient that
> put all the pieces together.
> 
> Dave Feldman, Head of Digital Products at Takeda


THE PROBLEM

David Feldman, Head of Digital Products and DevOps at Takeda, faced two
challenges.

First, he needed a common web infrastructure that served customers and partners
in more than 70 geographies. Takeda regional managers ran their own local sites
because each country has distinct compliance and healthcare regimes.

Second, Dave's team had a mandate to build the all-digital workplace. The
Digital Products team was responsible for multiple the internal apps and
websites to support a hybrid workforce of 60,000 around the world. The Takeda
digital team supported ~80 experiences when one combined country websites,
regional sites, and internal employee apps.

The Takeda digital team hypothesized that their existing monolithic DXP stack
couldn't do the job. But as they evaluated various decoupled and headless CMS
options, they were faced with even more questions. Should they go with an
API-first or API-only CMS? Which mix of agencies, developers, and vendors could
set up the internal Takeda team for long-term success?


THE SOLUTION


NEW STACKBIT-BASED ARCHITECTURE

Even after choosing Next.js and Sanity.io, Takeda's digital group needed help
putting all the headless pieces together. Working closely with Stackbit's
solution architects, Takeda built a platform that exceeded their expectations.
Dave complimented Stackbit, calling us "the replatforming experts" when it came
to the new headless content stack.

The team used Stackbit's unique capabilities to consolidate all 80 projects
within a single content source. As seen in the architecture diagram below, every
React component and Sanity content model is reusable across sites; all of them
are packaged into 3 neat npm packages.



The new architecture allowed a small dev team to use a single platform to
support an army of regional site managers and content experts. At the same time,
content managers were able to iterate their websites independently of the
developer team. Other companies that used headless CMS's to manage complex sites
often relied on a dedicated CMS expert. Takeda avoided this bottleneck by using
Stackbit's visual previews and synchronization.

Stackbit let Takeda developers, designers, marketers, regional managers, and
content managers to work with almost no dependencies on each other.

The team recognized that transitioning Takeda.com–a global corporate
pharmaceutical website–across dozens of languages was no easy task. The
challenge was compounded by the need to maintain compliance with the distinct
healthcare and privacy regulations of 70 different countries.


THE RESULTS


A NEW TAKEDA.COM

To ease the transition, the Takeda digital team built an automated system that
verified that each page in the new CMS would appear exactly as it did in the old
system. This avoided any pixel changes that might trigger expensive and
time-consuming compliance reviews with national regulators.

Takeda used a Stackbit feature called Content Filters to create country-specific
projects that were all stored in the same Sanity content source. For example,
the site manager of Takeda France could view all content around the world in the
CMS but only edit Takeda content stored under takeda.com/fr. In addition to
improving governance, this reduced content storage requirements which saved
Takeda tens of thousands of dollars in duplicate storage costs.

Finally, the Stackbit architecture empowered the central developer team in
Massachusetts to keep iterating on shared library components while regional site
managers independently adopted the new CMS at their own pace.


TAKEDA EMPLOYEE MARKETPLACE AND CAMPUS APPS

In addition to the external corporate site, Dave's team was responsible for
multiple digital experiences for Takeda employees.

For example, the Takeda Virtual Marketplace supported employees as an online
internal company store. The Marketplace let employees independently provision
their own laptops, equipment, and even high level vendor services like
Accenture. The site could not scale for the future; the team estimated that a
rebuild would require 12 months using the old stack. Thanks to the Stackbit and
the new architecture, the same team was able to roll out the new Marketplace app
in 3 months–four times faster!

Another example of the power of the new stack is was the new internal Takeda
Campus app for employees at the company's US headquarters. The app was built,
tested, and deployed in a fraction of the expected time because of the
reusability of the Next.js/Sanity components and Stackbit's orchestration. But
this was just the beginning.

> This is not just web content; it's actually structured content in a database
> that allows us to build for mobile platforms, Microsoft Mesh, and AR/VR.
> 
> Dave Feldman, Head of Digital Products at Takeda


NEXT STEPS


MARKETPLACE AND CAMPUS APPS

The agility and composability offered by Stackbit promised many new
possibilities for Takeda digital experiences. The team laid the foundation for
the Marketplace app to become full-blown Product Information Management (PIM)
application where outside vendors could manage their own inventory.

In the near future, the Takeda Campus app built on Stackbit will leverage the
Microsoft Graph of 60,000 employees to help employees collectively decide which
day is most efficient for a given team to come into the office–based on machine
learning algorithms that find the 50 colleagues you collaborate with most often.

The team has begun to explore APIs for AR/VR to enrich internal Takeda apps. As
Dave Feldman said, "This is not just web content; it's actually structured
content in a database that allows us to build for mobile platforms, Microsoft
Mesh, and AR/VR."


PLASMA DONATION CENTERS

The new Stackbit-based model will let Takeda explore other use cases. Takeda
subsidiary BioLife Plasma Services runs more than 100 plasma donation centers
that are run by clinicians. Similar to the individual store owners in Takeda
Marketplace and the country site managers in Takeda offices around the world,
Stackbit's powerful architecture and componentized approach will allow
individual clinicians to independently edit their own local sites while ensuring
global consistency and reduced developer time.


DIGITAL LEADERSHIP

Takeda Pharmaceuticals is one of the most innovative biomedical companies in the
world. Their rapid adoption of a Stackbit architecture and headless content
stack shows that they are also visionaries in web technology, digital
experiences, and empowering their global workforce.


TAKEDA

With $25+ billion in annual revenue, Takeda Pharmaceuticals is the largest
pharmaceutical company in Asia and one of the top 10 pharma companies in the
world.

Jeff Hwang


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