Brief
Glanbia is an Irish multinational nutrition company headquartered in Kilkenny, with over 5,500 employees across more than 30 countries. Its consumer brands and ingredients are sold or distributed in over 130 countries, with North America being its largest market.
The company’s product portfolio covers sports nutrition and lifestyle products, cheese, dairy and non-dairy nutritional and functional ingredients, and vitamin and mineral premixes, operating under brands such as Optimum Nutrition, BSN, Isopure, think!, and Amazing Grass.
Glanbia’s legacy on‑prem VM CMS had grown into a beast, with an almost unusable structure and limited usability for different teams. They required that the Global Comms team had the ability to publish worldwide, retain a higher level of oversight, while ensuring local site owners could still manage their own content without clashes, complexity, or risk.
Our task was to upgrade the current system and consolidating 60+ devices located across 14 sites in 4 countries, plus another 40+ devices needed to be migrated to a separate arm of the business, with equivalent functionality rebuilt on a new VM instance.
Approach
We began by mapping the existing estate, covering devices, media, schedules, and users, before rebuilding the CMS structure around a channels-per-location model, supported by a shared Global playlist for network-wide content. As part of this re-architecture, we recreated the relevant CMS components on a new VM instance to facilitate the clean separation of 40+ devices being split out to another business unit. The aim being that there would be no dramatic change to these end users other than the URL.
To bring consistency across the network, we standardised naming conventions and meta-tags, subscribed each device to its correct channel, and established a clear escalation path for any offline endpoints in coordination with the client’s IT team. Alongside this, all media and data feeds were migrated across to the newly created channels to ensure content continuity throughout the transition.
Finally, we delivered a layout refresh, introducing a simple multizone design featuring time and date, news, and local weather. The aim was to reduce ongoing maintenance overheads while keeping screens consistently useful across the network.
Result
The new structure brings clarity for both global and local teams, global content can be published once and reach everywhere, while local teams retain clean, dedicated playlists for their own content without overlap or confusion.
The separation of services to a new VM-based CMS was carried out without disruption, significantly reducing risk during what could otherwise have been a complex transition. Standardised device metadata and a clearly documented structure also mean that onboarding new devices or users is now a much faster, more straightforward process.
Overall, the result is a more sustainable way of working, less guesswork, fewer dead ends, and a governance model that supports the network as it continues to grow and evolve.
