Vision Healthcare offers omnichannel experiences to enhance consumer wellbeing with Hygraph

The Vision Healthcare story

With Vision Healthcare at the forefront of the digital revolution, its omnichannel platform plays a significant role in reshaping the consumer healthcare space. Therefore, the company launched a project to migrate the entire company's business logic into a new application landscape, including the content system, e-commerce platform, user interface, and shopping cart engine.

This new platform is intended to support the e-commerce stack for multiple Vision Healthcare brands with content in various formats. Vision Healthcare needed a solution that would allow them to have the system's stack built on performant GraphQL, develop faster in a highly competent e-commerce environment, and host multiple tenants simultaneously.

As part of the project, the Vision Healthcare team needed a new solution to host their content. In spite of significant time constraints, Vision Healthcare launched the project on time with Hygraph as the new multi-tenant content platform.

Project challenges

A hard-time to keep up with GraphQL

As part of the former CMS, Vision Healthcare experienced many issues, including poor performance of GraphQL queries and caching, which made up-to-date content delivery nearly impossible. GraphQL was a critical component of Vision Healthcare's stack, so they needed a solution that supported stable GraphQL performance.

A tight timeline to deliver the project

The team at Vision Healthcare only had 6 months to finish the project initially. They needed an immediate solution to get the team on board and working so they could deliver the project on time after some delays with the previous CMS.

Project needs

A stable website to outperform the e-commerce competition

As Vision Healthcare provides a robust e-commerce stack to all of its sub-brands, it's imperative that the content solution integrates well with the existing stack and is flexible enough to accommodate multi-tenants. For future integrations, the solution should also support GraphQL for fast content retrieval, support efficient caching, and work with Next.js as frontend. The team needed a solution that could be used immediately, manage content at scale without a hitch, and accommodate changes in locales quickly.

A composable system to improve the speed to market

As a buy-and-build company, every sub-brand of Vision Healthcare used to have its own development team. To stay ahead of the competition in the e-commerce space, the Vision Healthcare team wants to unify the system stack and improve it faster. The team chose a headless setup to allow quick technical adaption, which means if any of the components are outdated or there's a better component available, they can replace just that part instead of redoing the entire platform.

Hygraph’s solution

Having drawn an extensive POC, the team at Vision Healthcare trusted Hygraph to be a great fit to this project. The team was able to migrate the content without friction thanks to Hygraph's performant GraphQL content retrieval, multi-tenant management, and professional support in the shortest time possible.

A few of the key Hygraph features that contributed to this project's success include:

• GraphQL API: the team at Vision Healthcare especially liked the GraphQL query structure within Hygraph. By removing the node edges, the query only displays products, properties, and some relationships, thereby simplifying the workload and allowing the team to work more efficiently. Additionally, model creation and playground are straightforward and easy to use.

• Multi-tenancy: Vision Healthcare uses multi-tenancy as an enumeration that contains all tenants so that every model has a tenant field. With the UI extension, permissions are automatically selected based on the role and views are filtered based on the role. Editors can thus save time and see only relevant content. The team intends to keep the same structure throughout its organization in order to simplify business operations.

• Intuitive UI: Hygraph makes content update easy for editors with its intuitive UI so that the development team won’t have to offer a lot of technical support. Instead, they can focus on the development tasks.

• Timely support: As opposed than other platforms that send support requests to an automatic email system, Vision Healthcare was pleased to find that Hygraph responded quickly to all support requests, and that an escalation path is always available to resolve any issues.

The current setup

Hygraph is responsible for the content side of the Vision Healthcare application landscape including product categories, blogs, content pages, and general website settings.

Hygraph is integrated with the following platforms:

• Next.js on the frontend with static page generation, dynamic regeneration of pages connected with a webhook to Hygraph
• Commercetools as a headless commerce system and Algolia as a headless search engine, embracing a MACH methodology
• Custom built microservice order management system connecting to integrations like email marketing tool, Amazon, bol.com
• Channel engine that connects Vision Healthcare to marketplaces
• Emarsys for email marketing, sending out printed catalogs, direct mailing, SMS
• Microsoft Dynamics as ERP and accounting system
• Adyen as payment service provider

Key benefits

• The team at Vision Healthcare successfully migrated their entire application landscape and finished the project on time
• Platform crashes are no longer an issue, and GraphQL is now accountable for retrieving content
• Vision Healthcare's composable platform structure now allows it to update content and replace components faster to compete in e-commerce