Ergodyne Delivers Best-In-Class Product Leadership and Multichannel Distribution with Drupal Commerce and Pantheon

Challenge: Downtime and Expensive Transactions

Ergodyne’s website serves both B2B and B2C customers. The site is responsible for digital marketing campaigns, branding, and gated content for both customer segments. It is also a direct-to-consumer ecommerce site that supports a considerable number of transactions and revenue dollars each year. 

Before Pantheon, the lean IT team used the Magento ecommerce platform for multichannel customers and engaged an infrastructure as a service provider to host the website. However, Ergodyne’s small IT team spent most of its time simply managing the inflexible environment for availability and acceptable performance. 

Another major challenge was the ecommerce platform’s pricing structure. High migration and licensing costs were very steep, resulting in the high total cost of ownership (TCO) and pricing uncertainty.

Ian Handshy, Developer at Ergodyne, said, “We had to manage our own infrastructure, but the environment made it hard to provision and load balance, and we had to do it manually. On top of that, we had to deal with countless customer support tickets because of downtime and poor performance. We knew that we needed to change, to minimize the management load so we could focus on building our brand and serving customers.” 

The team needed a highly available and highly performant platform and an ecommerce engine that could manage a large, multichannel transactional base and a reliable pricing structure.

Why Pantheon: Purpose-Built for the Enterprise 

Pantheon is purpose-built to support collaboration and workflow automation for DevOps teams and provides consistently high-performance levels on enterprise websites. 

Handshy said, “Our previous site was labor-intensive for us and frustrated our customers with downtime and slow page loads. Pantheon and Drupal wiped that away. We’re a leader and innovator in the safety industry, and now our website reflects our leadership position and high standards.” 

When the team has questions, Pantheon Diamond Tier support responds immediately with fast solutions. And Advanced Global CDN, along with Multizone Failover secures the site against intrusion or downtime. 

Any time we ran into an issue, Pantheon had a prebuilt solution for it. For the rare times when they didn’t, they rapidly elevated the issue to their technical team and resolved it very quickly. Pantheon’s platform out-of-the-box solves 95% of our problems. Their excellent support solves the rest.

- Ian Handshy, Developer at Ergodyne

Results: Performance Up; Management Time Down 

Spinning up new sites is so simple with Pantheon that Ergodyne easily does it in-house. In fact, Klein Tools, which acquired Ergodyne, was so impressed with Pantheon’s power and flexibility that it is adopting Pantheon as well. 

Before Pantheon, the Ergodyne team fielded frequent customer complaints about slow page loads and nonresponsive checkout. Since Pantheon, customer service tickets, both calls and emails, are virtually non-existent. 

Management time fell from 40% of an administrator’s weekly workload to 0%. Instead of spending time on web management tasks, the team now spends more time developing customer content in Drupal and quickly rolling out changes across its digital site. 

Ergodyne plans to deploy Pantheon and Drupal to nearly 30 additional sites. The company expects that automated management and workflows will allow them to redirect the labor time of two full-time website administrators to more strategic initiatives. 

“Ergodyne is a very innovative, forward-thinking company,” said Kevin Enke, Digital Technology Manager, Klein Tools. “Our website exists to get that message out there. Ecommerce is critically important, but our great educational content is the foundation of our digital platform. Since content drives awareness and sales and our products keep people safe, you could say that our website reflects our company mission.”