How Mohawk Industries partnered with Adobe to accelerate their digital transformation from five years to one

When it comes to an efficient digital transformation plan, Mohawk Industries has it covered.

Mohawk Industries, the vertically integrated global flooring company whose brands include Dal-Tile, Pergo and Karastan, sped up its planned digital transformation with the help of Adobe Experience Cloud.

Mohawk leveraged Adobe Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service, a digital asset management (DAM) platform that gives businesses the tools to create, manage, deliver and optimize personalized digital experiences at scale, and Adobe Workfront, the leading work management application which Adobe acquired in December 2020.

“As a company, we were already focused on modernizing our digital capabilities,” said Brennan Swing, vice president of creative media and creative director at Mohawk. “But like most other industries and businesses, COVID-19 escalated the timeline for that and turned our five-year plan for digital transformation into one year.”

“This has been a pain point for the last five years,” said Swing. “As our products and brands expand year to year, and the expectation by consumers and customers increases to see and learn more, it’s essential to organize, automate and utilize all of our assets so that we have more time to focus on creative quality versus administration.”

It was clear any asset management system Mohawk adopted must be cloud-based so it would be able to scale and perform as requirements changed. Additionally, since upload, download and rendition times are faster with Cloud Service, teams handling assets in the background would be able to be more efficient and thus have more time to produce quality assets.

“Having Adobe Experience Manager Assets allows us to now be more consistent across all channels, reduce time to market and reduce the level of effort in designing experiences,” said Swing.

Organizing for success

Additionally, Swing has found that team involvement in these types of foundational tasks is crucial to wider acceptance within an organization.

“Like any tech platform, you have to have a team dedicated to utilization and enhancements, or it will not be institutionalized within the company,” said Swing. “The digital asset management team is responsible for training users, organizing and maturing content, maintaining a backlog, and providing ideas for future enhancements for our specific needs. As the platform grows, so will the team.”

Since implementing, Mohawk has seen wider adoption among Swing’s team. Using the platform, they can generate reports on assets published, calls to their product inventory management system, errors, and backlogs.

“To gauge success, we are looking for continued growth in asset downloads, syndications and login frequency,” Swing explained. “Right now, success is in the adoption of the tool.”

In addition, Mohawk is enabling self-service access to digital assets for almost 3,000 salespeople, 2,000 independent retailers and internal staff through Adobe Experience Manager Assets Brand Portal. Again, Swing and his team don’t need to be concerned if the team grows even bigger in the future — the cloud solution will scale alongside the company.

Tightening collaboration

In addition to improving the management of its data assets, Mohawk also sought ways to increase the efficiency of its production lifecycle. The company integrated Adobe Workfront with Adobe Experience Manager Assets to support planning, collaboration, and governance.

Before using Adobe Workfront, Mohawk had a large, decentralized portfolio of marketing work spanning multiple product lines, channels and geographies. Transparency and visibility were a challenge among the siloed efforts of various marketing and product departments. Mohawk’s team not only faced challenges in prioritizing work and generating reports, they also were tasked with doing time-intensive, manual work to provide visibility.

Since implementing Adobe Workfront, Mohawk has been able to:

• Tighten collaboration by aligning disparate initiatives into a marketing system of record.
• Automatically keep metadata in sync between Workfront projects and final assets.
• Improve visibility into post-product launch performance with robust KPI tracking.
• Improve lines of sight and streamline handoffs across regions.

In addition, Mohawk expects more than $5 million in direct incremental revenue gain from accelerated time to market and more than $1 million in direct capacity gain from improved automation.

“With a fully integrated technology portfolio, we can reduce our time to market by 85 percent thanks to the improved collaboration we are seeing between product and marketing teams,” said Swing.

The future

Mohawk anticipates that their integrated suite of solutions will lead to greater efficiencies and measurable results — both internally and among competitors.

“We are looking forward to continued integration of Adobe with our product information management (PIM) solution, inRiver, to allow us to automate customer experiences with efficiency and scale across the business,” said Swing.

He also sees enormous potential to harness the power of Adobe to provide self-service custom assets.

“I believe there is about to be a paradigm shift in how users design around experiences, edit files and even access those files,” he said. “In essence, from concept to consumption, the experience should be natural to the user. We want governed freedom — users can self-serve, while integrations and real-time information exchange remains seamless and intact.”

Swing is pleased with Mohawk’s advancements and innovations during a period of widespread disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic that made digital experiences more crucial to its interactions with customers.

“I am proud our company saw the benefit in not playing it safe, and went full throttle into investing for the future,” he said. “The ability for our technology solutions to play nice with others and fully integrate into our tech stack is crucial. It gives us the power to deliver amazing customer experiences with efficiency and scale.”