Corporate Tenders

How Tender Service built 15 custom multi-country portals with Storyblok

Headquarters: Trnava, Slovakia
Technology: Angular

Tender Service manages a large database of public tenders for businesses in 15 different European and Latin American markets. By using Storyblok, Tender Service can manage their multi-country portals all in one location. The team moved from a self-made Grails application and started using Storyblok in just 1.5 months. They also created a custom deployment script in only 1 week. With Storyblok, TenderService simplified their multi-country portal management and embraced lightning-fast startup times.

1.5 months Build Time
1 Week Custom script deployment
15 Markets

With Storyblok, we are able to save time on our go-to-market strategy.

Daniela Ponzi Country Manager at Tender Service

Challenges that restricted flexibility over time

Tender Service’s previous website was based on a self-developed Grails application, with a homegrown CMS. Over time, the team realized a few challenges, including:

The previous CMS solution was closely tied to the entire Grails application, making it difficult to create new layouts and designs
A lengthy deployment process for developers
An increasing need to simplify the management of multiple country portals. It was key to make them localized and aligned with the corporate identity
An increasing lack of flexibility in the application. Marketers and developers needed to do a lot of manual heavy-lifting on edits

The team realized they needed a new way of organizing their system with a headless CMS. This could give content managers and developers more flexibility in the long run.

Solutions for a multi-country portal setup

Storyblok came into play thanks to CloudFlight (agency partner). Storyblok was able to tick off all the requirements that Tender Service was looking for, including:

Clear documentation during implementation: To ensure a smooth migration and prototype development with Angular
Multi-language capabilities: Handling Tender Service’s 15 localized sites in a centralized location for country managers
User Roles: Preventing content managers from breaking the design (corporate identity) on all pages and help them manage page layouts flexibly
Image Service: Content editors are able to automatically and easily optimize image assets
Easy-to-use Visual Editor: A user-friendly and streamlined experience for marketers and developers
Management API: Enabling developers to deploy custom script within a week, leveraging an existing command line client with additional features

Managing over 15 multi-country portals

Tender Service began by creating a simple Angular demo/prototype project to build the basic foundation. After connecting the Management API, they could easily move their old content into Storyblok.

A designated country manager is responsible for managing each country portal. Each portal is organized in folders (root folders), so that every country manager can only access the folder of the country they're managing.

Tender Service uses Storyblok across the following sites: