Among the world’s four largest energy companies, the client has a market capitalisation of approximately $100 billion and yearly revenues double that. It runs operations in over 80 countries with an employee base of nearly 90,000.

Like with any giant of this size operating in this industry, the company had thousands of moving parts, resulting in a complicated landscape that was resistant to change. And ‘change’ was precisely what it needed with the world moving towards a more digital and carbon-neutral future.  

This is where we stepped in, helping the company prepare for a more agile and sustainable future, through design.

The client’s complex web of code base patterns, templates, and elements across 200,000+ interfaces and 1500+ tech stacks proliferated across internal groups, numerous international brands, and disparate technologies posed a singular challenge – fragmentation. This made it difficult to standardise design and code quality throughout the organisation.

At a larger level, this also made the company’s sustainability ambitions difficult, as it required organisation-level agility in how different products, services, and systems were developed. Simply put, the company needed a new way of working, digitally.

We were brought in as the preferred partner to support the company as it pursued a design-driven digital transformation program.

To this end, we dug into our domain expertise in helping organisations leverage design systems to standardise quality, but at scale. As a first step, we worked on mapping the lay of the land by understanding the client’s technological capabilities and challenges.

Marrying that knowledge with extensive research and leadership consultations, we developed a set of solutions that covered tooling, tech stack, governance, and a design system.
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The outcome is a vast and evolving library of reusable design elements that helps designers and developers build at pace and at scale while adhering to the company’s quality, cost, and sustainability requirements.

Our approach and outcome were received enthusiastically by the company’s leadership team, paving the way for seamless implementation within the sprawling organisation.

The design system had been designed with sustainability as a key metric from its foundation, from the design, build, and maintenance. This laid the blueprint to updating and optimising both design and business processes throughout the digital portfolio. By doing so, we educated users on how to practically and measurably reduce carbon and decarbonise design with sustainability built in.
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This resulted in over 300 projects onboarded to use the design system, an 85% reduction in front-end bugs, and over $50 million in savings due to the synergies offered by the design system.