zeroheight helps Pernod Ricard scale faster amidst their digital transformation

If you’ve had a drink, you’ve likely sampled a wine or spirit made by Pernod Ricard. Today the group owns over 240 premium brands available across 160 countries. To name a few: there’s Absolut, Jameson, Chivas, and Havana Club. The company makes champagnes as well, including Mumm and Perrier Jouet.

Back in 2020, Pernod Ricard launched a massive digital acceleration with the ambition to leverage data and AI at the core of its business. The initiative included four programs that tackle the key areas of business: demand analysis, marketing investment, promotions, and sales.

Gradually, Pernod Ricard has gotten the right people, systems, and tools in place to ensure long-term success, which includes elevating their design and UX expertise. And for that, Pernod Ricard has developed its own design system to help scale its new digital products efficiently: Archipelago.

Creating a design system with zeroheight allowed the company to unify and enhance the digital experience for all Pernod Ricard collaborators across the globe and scale at a cost-efficient speed.

Making Data Accessible to All Employees

For many companies, creating a design system is a way to enable product teams. And while that’s certainly the case at Pernod Ricard, they’ve also used the design system to empower the company at large with better data visualization tools.

A key part of the company’s digital transformation is leveraging Artificial Intelligence to help fulfill consumer demand. The marketing, product, and distribution teams all use data to predict and answer consumer behavior.

And with an intense focus on data, data visualization has come to the forefront.

Archipelago, Pernod Ricard’s design system, has become the place for designers and developers to find the right component to best display important data. To make that easier, the design system team annotates their design uploads to showcase the anatomy of various charts.

Now that everyone across the company is using dashboards and charts to support their decision-making processes, the design team is starting to work on a new way to visualize data.

They hope to make their interfaces modular, which would allow collaborators to build their own pages using dashboards. Ultimately, improvements in data visualization will make it easier for all Pernod Ricard employees to make quick, fact-based decisions.

Centering the User Experience

For Pernod Ricard’s customers, the design system has led to a better user experience.

And that’s by design. The design team’s performance at Pernod Ricard is measured on three key metrics: business impact, sustainable adoption, and user experience.

And among the three, user experience is a huge focus.

Pierre-Yves Calloc’h, Chief Digital Officer at Pernod Ricard, explains:

Design helps us to be consumer and collaborator centric internally and externally by putting human beings at the center of everything we do.

To deliver great design, the company has made a few changes.

One of those changes was a shift from project-based work to more digital product teams. “And the design system is a key milestone of this transition for the whole company,” remarks Hélène Chaplain, Group CIO at Pernod Ricard. She continues:

The design system has helped teams to deliver faster, reduce costs, streamline development, and align our technological frameworks.

With more product teams working together, the design system has become the place to ensure interactions across all of Pernod Ricard’s digital transformation tools are standard. The company has also created templates to help reuse experiences at a much lower cost.

In the end, the extensive documentation in zeroheight has helped the design team meet its goal of improving user experience without the need for ever-increasing expenditures.

Using the Design System to Scale Fast

For product teams, the design system has helped them scale quickly. The Pernod Ricard team adopted zeroheight to reduce the amount of time designers and developers spent on redundant work and make the handover more efficient.

Pierre-Yves Calloc’h, Chief Digital Officer at Pernod Ricard, explains, “We are building very similar tools for different functions of the company… It became obvious that it didn’t make sense to develop tool after tool using the same element with only slight differences.”

zeroheight has become the place for internal teams to access commonly used components like accordions, buttons, and headers.

Since there’s a single source of truth, product teams across the organization can use components to design and develop much quicker. Pernod Ricard’s digital tools are not islands anymore, they are part of a consistent and common Archipelago.

Hélène Chaplain, Group CIO at Pernod Ricard, furthered, “we made the strategic decision to centralize the design and the development and make all the components accessible to the company to ensure the highest level of quality for our developers.”

The executive team at Pernod Ricard estimates that adopting Archipelago will accelerate product delivery by 34% and save the same percentage on product design and development costs.

Measuring the value of the design system

A company on the cutting edge of using artificial intelligence hasn’t forgotten about measuring the value of its design system. And they have a clear objective for their design system: increasing the ROI of their digital products by lowering production costs.

To ensure Archipelago meets the ambitious goal, they’ve defined three key performance indicators (KPI’s)􏰂

• Business viability: number of components used and creation costs
• Team performance: number of new components created and personnel/days to design and develop them
• UX performance: user satisfaction and efficiency

Understanding the value of component usage

Component usage is at the top of the list of Pernod Ricard’s KPI’s for good reason. When components are used, it means that the total development cost goes down.

To calculate the ROI from component usage, the team looked at the initial cost associated with creating and documenting the component plus the cost of using the component subsequently.

After analyzing component usage so far, they’ve estimated that they should break even in 4 years with 4 digital transformation tools and 35 internal development teams using Archipelago. Their analysis includes the cost associated with adopting zeroheight and the personnel costs associated with documentation. Ultimately, reducing costs means increasing the User Experience quality and value by distributing the cost among various products with no additional investments.

Documenting new components

Apart from component usage, the team keeps track of the time needed to design and develop each component of Archipelago . Functionally, the team wants to determine how long it takes to create and use a component from the design system vs. creating a component from scratch.

So far, they’ve found that using components documented in zeroheight helps to reduce the time to deliver new web apps. And as an added bonus, documentation has helped get new product teams started much quicker.

Employee satisfaction as a metric for the Design System

The design team at Pernod Ricard is evaluated based on customer satisfaction, so it only makes sense that their design system is measured with the same metric. The UX Research team of Pernod Ricard is deep-diving into every release to identify ergonomic issues and collect both positive and constructive feedback.

The design system team believes that quality components and documentation will lead to better products and happier customers, and certainly, the best way to determine quality is by asking design system users.

Looking ahead

Archipelago is a key part of Pernod Ricard’s broader digital transformation. Pierre-Yves Calloc’h remarked that the design system will “define new ways to interact with AI and enable our collaborators to find a suitable common workplace to work more efficiently. In that sense, our vision is that Archipelago will serve as a consistent operating system interface for our collaborators in their daily working life.”

For Hélène Chaplain, the design system will help the large company stay aligned. She explains, “The future of Archipelago is [that] it will be used by every collaborator in the company every day for every tool developed internally. And maybe soon foster conviviality by open sourcing and sharing to the entrepreneur community who need an efficient design system!”

The Pernod Ricard team has big goals for their design system. And based on its current ability to impact business goals, it seems like they’re likely to hit them.