Crane Aerospace & Electronics

Lifting Off with a Custom Drupal Build

This manufacturer needed a website that was as tech-savvy as their critical components — the perfect opportunity for a custom Drupal build.

SERVICES PROVIDED

Technical Scoping
Custom CMS
Drupal Development

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Meet Crane Aerospace & Electronics

Meet Crane Aerospace & Electronics

Crane Aerospace & Electronics manufactures a wide range of critical components used in airplanes, spacecraft, satellites, microwave, and defense systems. Their website was out of date, not built for mobile devices, and lacked a content management system (CMS), making content updates time-consuming and difficult.

I was very impressed by the professional and methodical manner in which data was collected and the integration was done on the website. Everything felt like clockwork as it was coming together.

Dave Dickson

The Challenge

The Crane team knew they needed a new website that could be a central sales and marketing tool to provide information about Crane A&E news, brands, and products for employees, customers, and suppliers—all in a cohesive experience.

The Solution

We began with a scoping phase and being a conglomerate with multiple major business units, there were many stakeholders needs to consider. Our team had a chance to meet with each major business unit and discuss their section of the new website in detail.

Their new website is powered by Drupal 8 CMS, providing a major improvement in terms of site performance along with an easy-to-maintain admin interface for the Crane internal team.

In addition to revamping the information architecture for the main Crane Aerospace website and product catalog, we were able to consolidate two additional business units (that ran on their own domains) into the new structure. A significant, manual content migration was completed to get everything into its new home.

The Results

Over the years, there had been many custom-built web forms, and specific lookup features built onto the old site. Many of these were improved using the Drupal CMS infrastructure that was put in place. We leveraged core Drupal features including accounts, roles, web forms, views, and view filters to rebuild these custom features.

Custom Features

Product Finder

To help customers quickly find the products they’re looking for, Crane needed a custom product finder which we built leveraging the existing product catalog details and Drupal views/filters to provide an ajax lookup.

Military Quotes

We created a portal for authenticated US Military users to request and view quotes. Features include gated access to a customer portal, web forms, and a searchable result set for users.

Microwave Products Finder

We created a data sheet lookup tool for the Microwave Products line. The finder contains a product type select list and additional primary and secondary feature select lists appear for some product types.

Spares Catalog

Registered users can view a catalog of commercial spare parts. This is displayed in table format with sortable column headings and a search area to aid users in filtering the data.

SmartStem Product Registration

After purchasing a SmartStem system kit, the owner can register their system at the SmartStem Product Registration page—unlocking access to the installation documents, Letter of Authorization (LOA), and airworthiness documentation.

Repair Capabilities Lookup

The Repair Capabilities Lookup tool helps customers find locations where products can be repaired or replaced. The lookup contains a search field with results presented in a table format. We provided this in an easy-to-update tool for Crane admins.