Vensafe - Automated Sales Solutions in Five European Countries

Vensafe is the world's leading company dealing with solutions which secure increased surpluses on high-value products within the retail business. Vensafe reduce shrinkage and increase sale of high value products in the retail business with automated sale solutions.
The company is active in five European countries, and operates from its main office in Moss, south of Oslo. Besides Norway, Vensafe has established daughter companies in Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Belgium. Today there are more than 4000 Vensafe dispensers distributed between the different markets

As such, they need to communicate with shop owners, and building a website became a must. Their mission is to make retailers more profitable. Geir Gulland, project lead at the web agency Front Kommunikasjon, explains “We strive to make the retailers more profitable, which is the footprint in our strategy.” Retailers needed to know about this service and a website was the best way to reach old as well as prospective clients.

Through their website, Vensafe can convey visitors that Vensafe’s commercial success is based on their ability to work hand-in-hand with them as their customer and in deserving customers’ confidence, trust and loyalty.

Why Drupal?

The website was already built in Joomla, but Vensafe needed to localize their website into six languages and Drupal was better and more cost-effective.

Drupal architecture assigns different nodes to different languages. A key element in the new site was Vensafe's profit calculator, which works differently for different countries. Since translations go to different nodes, this was trivial to implement with Drupal.

One of the main reasons for choosing Drupal is that it has, without a doubt, the biggest number of contributors. The more contributors there are, the more chances you have to find someone who can help you with a specific task, or even someone who has created a module for what you need. Also, given the number of users for any major module, any bug or security issues are very likely to be discovered and fixed in a very short time.

What drew Vensafe to Drupal:

• The advanced URL control. Using the modules Path, Path Auto, Path Redirect and Global Redirect allows you to have a nice, custom, auto generated URL for each piece of content, and automate the change of the URL when the content is updated (changed). Also all the URL's at which the content is available get redirected to one clean URL, which is ideal for the search engines that crawl your site
• The native support for localization, allowing you to build multilingual sites.
• Easy JQuery integration.
• Cost effectiveness - developing in Drupal usually takes only a fraction of the time you would need to develop using other technologies.
• Scalability - there are websites built on Drupal that have hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per day.
• Availability of experts - according to w3techs.com, it is used by 1.4% of all the websites in the world (with a 6.3% marketshare), and is rapidly expanding.

Why Vensafe Must be Multilingual?

A quick look at Vensafe's client lists shows why vensafe.com has to be multilingual. With clients spread over most of Northern Europe, vensafe.com must speak several languages.

Vensafe needed to get the jargon, the technical language for different countries. They needed exact terms in other languages together with perfect grammar and a style of excellence. For this, Front Kommunikasjon reviewed the Translation Management module. They had tried other translation systems before and they were too slow and expensive.

Vensafe used professional translators from ICanLocalize to translate to all languages. The automated translation workflow, coupled with the direct access to translators gives them the exact results they were looking for.

Modules Used

The most notable contributed modules used are:

• Path Auto – used to generate path aliases in all languages.
• Panels – used to create custom layouts for some pages.
• Webform – used to create forms for support and product cards ordering.
• CCK – used to create all the custom fields needed for the custom Profit Calculator module (see below).
• Nodequeue – used to create queues of nodes for every product category.
• Backup & Migrate – used to back-up databases.
• Internationalization (i18n) – used to make the site multilingual.
• Translation Management - used to translate the contents to all the languages needed.
• Vensafe's profit calculator was built using a custom module.

Who Did What

Geir Gulland was the project lead at Front.no who developed the website. Per Andre Rønsen at Front.no was in charge of Drupal developement. Amir Helzer and Bruce Pearson of ICanLocalize are responsible for the Translation Management module.