Plumbing Web content at Kohler

Spotting trends in kitchen and bath design reaps obvious benefits for a company like Kohler, a leader in plumbing products. More subtle, but also beneficial, is the ability to spot trends and value in technology.

Kohler recently chose a content management solution to power all of its Web sites. FatWire's Content Server—running on BEA Systems' WebLogic application server with an Oracle database—will be the corporate standard for building and managing dozens of Web sites for the Kohler family of businesses.

"The solution allows us to empower the end users within Kohler's various businesses with the ability to quickly manage and deliver content," says Mark Mitchelson, systems project leader for E-Business Systems at Kohler. "This compresses the edit, approval and publishing time frame from a few days to a few hours."

Mitchelson adds, "Given the number and diversity of the sites we will deploy, it was essential to have a solution that allows us to gain the efficiencies to drive down cost and time it takes to deploy each subsequent site. FatWire also provides us with the ability to add dynamic publishing and personalization to an online catalog component in the future."

The implementation is already underway at Kohler, according to a recent press release from FatWire. Five legacy sites, including destinationkohler.com, were converted in 2003 and twice that many are scheduled this year, as the technology is rolled out enterprisewide.

Kohler has formed an internal competency center to develop best-practice architectures and corporate standards for all divisions to follow as they build and launch their sites.