Ingersoll Rand's China platform, replatformed in five months.

20+

Brand tenants in China

5

Months to delivery

5

Core team

1000s

Pages migrated

10,000s

Media assets migrated

10,000s

Redirects handled

• Hit the OCM cut-off
• 9 page types
• Tens of reusable blocks
• 2 active languages
• AWS China
• 24/7 monitoring

Technical, organizational, and regulatory difficulties compounded on a fixed end-of-life deadline.

IRIS was an existing global product. Any one of the constraints below could have slipped the date on its own.

1. A platform already in flight.

   IRIS 2.0 ran on Contentstack globally, with production logic shaped around CMS-specific data. China was still on IRIS 1.0 with Oracle Content Manager because Contentstack was not available in the region. OCM announced its discontinuation. China needed a new path on a fixed date, without an open-ended rewrite.

2. A deployment target with its own complexity.

   The platform had to run inside AWS China for the regional rollout. We partnered with a local infrastructure organization to stand up AWS China and wire in 24/7 monitoring at the uptime expectations of a corporation of Ingersoll Rand's size. The infrastructure track had to land on the same timeline as the CMS itself, because downtime was not negotiable for a live customer-facing platform.

3. Stakeholders distributed across regions.

   The China rollout had to work for China and absorb feature requests from the global team. Teams were spread across regions, decision-makers across time zones. Gathering and reconciling requirements took sustained pressure from our side. The entire project ran on what we collected.

4. Full ownership of implementation planning.

   Ingersoll Rand trusted WAYF to own how the implementation was planned. Before any code was written, we ran product scoping sessions with stakeholders to define the editor population, the content model, the authoring workflow, and the integrations with the rest of Ingersoll Rand. That scoping phase is what let the rest of the project ship on time.

5. A hard deadline that forced prioritization.

   The OCM switch-off was fixed. We delivered by drawing a line between work that had to ship before the switch-off and work that could be scoped for after. That call was made early and held throughout delivery. It is the reason the project landed on time without cutting corners on the pieces that mattered for launch.

A five-person core team running continuous delivery.

A Content Provider layer keeps IRIS independent of any specific CMS.

Ingersoll Rand's frontend is a complex Next.js application, and IRIS 2.0 had been tightly coupled to Contentstack. Swapping one CMS for another would have solved the short-term migration while leaving the same architectural problem in a new form. It would have also left China's Payload and the rest of IRIS on Contentstack as two divergent codebases.

The key decision was to introduce a Content Provider Service inside IRIS. The layer selects the active provider through configuration and validates input and output with Zod. The rest of the application sees one shared content contract and receives data in a common schema, regardless of which CMS sits behind the interface.

We built adapters for both Contentstack and Payload against that contract. Page types, feature blocks, media, rich text, routing, SEO, regionalization, navigation maps, distributors, gated content, and tenant configuration moved behind provider adapters. Provider logic that had been scattered was centralized, and smaller refactors improved routing, data mapping, and cache boundaries.

Payload met the technical bar and the regional constraint.

Payload was selected over other self-hosted CMS options for its flexibility, developer-oriented architecture, and extension model. Its modern stack made custom development faster on a tight timeline. That mattered for the parts of IRIS that needed to go past out-of-the-box behavior, including granular RBAC, custom dashboards, custom API endpoints, and the navigation map projection.

The China rollout also imposed a regional constraint. The chosen CMS had to operate inside mainland China, where Contentstack was not available. Payload satisfied both the technical and the regional requirements.

A dedicated CMS on Payload, tailored for the IRIS team.

The workspace supports 20+ brand tenants in the China region. Multiple editors manage localized content, tenant configuration, redirects, page hierarchy, and reusable content blocks in a single shared environment. The content model supports 9 page types today and was designed so new page types and blocks can be added without rethinking the system.

Public site performance should not depend on how many editors are active.

Payload does significant database work behind the scenes, around drafts, versions, localization, and relationships. In the first phase of the build, activity inside the CMS could affect consumer site performance. For an enterprise platform, that kind of coupling is risky.

We solved it by changing the read model. Critical public data is not served directly from the Payload database. IRIS reads prepared projections backed by Redis instead. Tenant configuration is cached as prepared data. Navigation maps are rebuilt and stored separately, with published and draft states handled independently. Public traffic reads from the published snapshot, and draft preview merges published and draft nodes when editors review changes before publishing.

This shifted Payload into the right role. It remains the editorial system, where content is modeled, reviewed, and published. IRIS consumes fast, stable data prepared for runtime use.

A manual migration, validated by QA at every step.

Migrating China from OCM + IRIS 1.0 to Payload + IRIS 2.0 covered thousands of pages, tens of thousands of media assets, and tens of thousands of redirects. The migration was carried out manually by a coordinated migration team. Every migrated artifact was validated against the existing IRIS 1.0 implementation by QA and stakeholders to make sure the full scope was preserved across content, structure, media, and routing.

Manual migration was a deliberate choice for an asset of this importance. With a fixed deadline and a multi-tenant production platform on the other side of the cutover, parity with IRIS 1.0 was the priority. Validation against the source system gave both teams confidence that nothing slipped through silently.

The Ingersoll Rand Form Builder integration shows how the CMS had to fit into an existing enterprise environment. Editors do not paste raw form IDs into Payload. We built an editing flow where they select the Form Builder instance, choose a group, then pick a published template fetched from the external API. On the IRIS side, the application scans content blocks for form references, fetches the data in batches from that API, and passes resolved form data into the page adapter.

QA was continuous. A dedicated engineer worked alongside development from day one.

A dedicated QA engineer worked alongside development throughout the project. A separate UAT environment was maintained so QA and stakeholders could validate work in conditions close to production before anything shipped.

Before go-live, QA and stakeholders signed off on manual end-to-end validation across content, workflow, integrations, and migrated data. The launch itself was supported by a launch checklist and a rollback plan, so that a deadline-driven cutover did not have to depend on everything going right the first time.

Handover was a deliverable in its own right.

Content editors were introduced to the system step by step in dedicated live workshops, walking through real authoring scenarios on the live platform. Those sessions were paired with feature-level written documentation that editors can return to afterwards, covering the parts of the CMS they use day to day, including page hierarchy, blocks, publication workflow, redirects, and tenant-scoped permissions.

The combination of guided sessions and reference documentation was deliberate. Live workshops build confidence quickly. Written documentation sustains it after the project team rolls off.