Moving off a platform scaled for a requirement the site has since outgrown.
An AEM migration for industrial manufacturers, component suppliers and engineering groups leaving Adobe Experience Manager. The trigger is rarely the software itself. It is usually that the licence and specialist implementation cost has grown out of proportion to what the site does day to day, or that the marketing team cannot publish a revised datasheet without opening a ticket with an implementation partner and waiting for a release window.
We audit what the current AEM instance holds, recommend a target platform sized to the real requirement, move the content with a complete URL map, and verify afterwards that the catalogue, the document library and the distributor-facing pages all resolve where search engines and partner sites expect them.
Adobe Experience Manager is a capable enterprise platform, and the organisations that use it well tend to have a central digital team, a defined release process and an implementation partner on retainer. Adobe quotes AEM licensing per organisation rather than publishing a list price, so the figure varies widely, but the licence is only part of the picture: the recurring cost that pushes industrial manufacturers to review the platform is usually the specialist development time needed for routine work.
When adding a product variant, correcting a technical specification or replacing a certificate involves a partner ticket and a scheduled deployment, the platform starts to set the pace of the marketing programme. See WordPress vs AEM for industrial B2B for the fuller comparison behind that decision.
A content inventory of what the current AEM implementation holds, including the parts of it that no internal team has looked at in years. A recommendation for a target platform matched to your catalogue size, your document volume and the technical capacity of the team who will run it. The migration itself with a complete URL map and a redirect set that goes live at cutover. Then a verification pass: page-by-page reconciliation against the inventory, individual redirect testing, and crawl and coverage monitoring in Search Console for the weeks that follow.
The wider methodology is set out on our industrial website migration page.
On an industrial site the catalogue is usually the largest single body of content and the one with the most fragile provenance. Part numbers, technical attributes, dimensional data and market availability may be maintained in an ERP such as SAP, Dynamics, Infor or Sage, in a PIM such as Akeneo or Pimcore, or in a spreadsheet that predates both. AEM implementations often hold a partial copy of that data with local edits layered on top.
Part of the audit is establishing which system owns each field, so the new site reads from the record of truth rather than inheriting another divergent copy. Where a PIM or ERP should be feeding the catalogue, we set that up as part of the move rather than after it. Our PIM and product data page covers how that connection is built and monitored.
Datasheets, safety data sheets, declarations of conformity, CE and REACH documentation, installation manuals, CAD and BIM files: this library is where the real migration risk sits. These files are deep-linked from distributor and dealer sites, from trade association directories, from procurement portals and from emails sent to specifying engineers years ago. The people holding those links will not be told the URL changed.
Every document URL therefore goes into the map alongside the pages, including files served from the AEM DAM under generated paths. Where a document is superseded rather than moved, the old URL still needs a destination, and we agree what that destination is before cutover rather than discovering the gap in a 404 report afterwards.
Two AEM-specific structures shape the work. The first is the Digital Asset Manager, which holds images, renderings, video and documents together with the metadata that makes them findable: tags, usage rights, market restrictions and approval state. Migrating that library as a flat folder of files would leave the marketing team re-tagging by hand for months, so the metadata moves with the assets into structured fields on the target platform.
The second is the AEM page hierarchy, which generates URL paths from the authoring tree. Those paths rarely match how anyone would structure the site today, and they rarely map one-to-one onto the target platform. Reconciling the two is the core of the URL mapping exercise, and it is manual work on the long tail, because that is precisely where an automated rule set stops being reliable.
There are industrial groups for which AEM remains the right platform, and we would say so rather than quote for a migration. If a central digital team runs dozens of market sites and several brands from one authoring environment, if the DAM is the operational hub for a large asset library shared with agencies and distributors across regions, or if AEM is already embedded alongside other Adobe Experience Cloud products your commercial teams depend on, the platform is doing work a lighter stack would have to reproduce at cost.
The same applies where an internal team already holds AEM skills and the implementation is well maintained. A migration is worth considering when the platform is setting the pace of your work rather than supporting it, and it is worth declining when it is not.
We do not take on AEM administration, AEM authoring support or further AEM component development, and we would not be the right partner for an organisation whose plan is to stay. What we take on is the move away from it, including the parts most teams are wary of losing: the asset library with its metadata, the document set with its inbound links, and the catalogue with its relationship to the system that owns the data.
Code Industrial is the industrial B2B practice of Code Barcelona, an agency building corporate websites and digital platforms since 2015. The same strategy, design and engineering team works on every industrial project, from the first scoping session through to life after launch.
The trigger differs by company. An AEM migration starts from whatever forced the decision, and the scope follows from that.
What comes up when an industrial company moves off Adobe Experience Manager.
Through mechanism rather than promise. Every URL the current AEM instance answers to is mapped to a destination before cutover, including paths generated by the authoring hierarchy and DAM-hosted assets that carry their own indexed URLs. The redirect set ships with the launch, canonicals and hreflang are rebuilt, and sitemaps are regenerated. We then monitor coverage and crawl behaviour in Search Console. That is the work that gives a migration the best chance of holding its position; no agency can guarantee a ranking outcome.
Most often a properly structured WordPress build for industrial B2B, with the catalogue driven from the ERP or PIM that owns the product record and the document library modelled as a first-class content type with its own access rules. We size that recommendation against your catalogue, your document volume and your market count rather than applying it by default. Where the audit points to enterprise tooling, we say so.
Usually, though replication is the starting point for a conversation rather than an automatic requirement. Custom components are often built to work around a constraint the target platform does not share, in which case a native equivalent does the same job with less to maintain. During the audit we mark each component as replicate, replace or retire, agree that list with you, and scope the build from the agreed list rather than from the full inventory.
They move with their metadata. Tags, usage rights, market restrictions and approval state are mapped onto structured fields on the target platform so the library stays searchable from day one rather than arriving as an unsorted folder. Asset URLs go into the redirect map alongside pages, since renderings and documents served from the DAM are frequently deep-linked by distributors and trade directories and would otherwise break silently.
Timelines follow the audit rather than a formula. The variables that move them are catalogue size and how much of it should be fed from an ERP or PIM, the volume and revision depth of the technical document library, the number of market and language variants, and how much custom component work needs rebuilding. A single-market site with a modest range moves considerably faster than a multi-brand instance with a deep document archive. We scope against findings from your installation.
When the platform is doing work that would have to be rebuilt at cost elsewhere. If a central team authors many market sites and brands from one environment, if the DAM is the operational hub for a large shared asset library, if AEM is embedded alongside other Adobe Experience Cloud products your commercial teams rely on, or if you already hold the skills internally and the implementation is well maintained, the case for moving is weak. We would tell you that rather than quote.
AEM migration connects closely with these related technology pages.
A licence and a release cycle that no longer match how your catalogue and document library need to change. Tell us what the current AEM instance holds and we will tell you how we would approach the AEM migration, including where we would advise staying.