PHP

Implementation of an online portal for shipment & transportation company

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:57:37 +0000

Implementation of an online portal for shipment & transportation company admin Tue, 01/10/2023 - 21:57

Implementation of an online portal for shipment & transportation company for end-to-end job management and advanced Quickbooks integration

Logistics & Transportation

Australia, New Zealand

Complete end-to-end shipment order management and fulfilment mechanism implementation

Intricate price calculation based on weight and size of shipment

Barcode scanning mechanism for orders

Solutions design

Backend development

Frontend development

Drupal 8

Quickbooks integration

Amazon AWS

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

We were referred to this client by one of our past clients, who had an extremely positive experience with us. But nevertheless, he did a detailed review of our past case studies and technical capabilities. A series of meetings were set up, and finally we were able to convince him and his partners to engage with us.

Wards Transportation is a shipment & transportation management company based in Queensland, Australia. The company was founded in 2003 and since then has been successfully serving freight and transportation management systems across a diverse range of industries.

At the point the client contacted us, their main business was handled offline through a very primitive booking system. This was causing huge issues to their expansion plan. They came to us with a vision to create a full-blown back office management system for their business. This includes the creation of shipment (called jobs), manifests, connotes, scanning of barcodes feature, integration with QuickBooks API, and a host of other features. A systematic transition from one phase to another needed to be achieved which helps in smooth transit between different branches along with the detailed record-keeping and job sheet creations through barcode scanning feature which we implemented.

20 years of operation

2000+ customers served

4 fulfillment locations

The main goal of the project was to build a complete back-office management system for the client's growing transportation and shipment business. This would need to accommodate literally everything they do in their day-to-day business, which till that time would happen in pen and paper mode. They wanted to convert this to web-based handling which they could then use in their various branches and checkpoints. The feature set needed was job creation, price calculation based on set pricing and weight rules, branch to branch transition, connote and manifest creation, PDF generation, barcode scanning, and Quickbooks integration. The project was huge and there were complications at various levels, which our team discussed during the discovery phase. We spoke to the client, got clarity, made suggestions, and finally came up with a working plan.

The main implementational requirements were as follows:

Job Creation

The basic unit was called ‘Job’. This would contain customer reference, sender and origin branch reference, and around 42 fields conditionally displaying which collect various information about the job and later helps in tracking and finally a field collection with the actual job items. The most complicated part was the validation and calculation. Each job item, based on the selected pricing plan and weight mode needed to be validated against set criteria, and the price needed to be calculated through AJAX. Forms API, Field API, AJAX API, and validation handlers we heavily utilized and every single logical channel was handled with care keeping the performance parameter in mind. The client wanted each calculation and validation to not take more than a few sec and we needed to implement heavy performance tuning in order to achieve this.

Customer Creation

Customers were referenced at various points in job creation - customer, sender, and receiver. The customer content type had about 54 fields taking inputs on various information about the customer. It was neatly organized into various tabs through field collection tabs and field collection ajax modules. For a customer, there would be a few pricing plans attached which would decide how the pricing rules will be applied to the jobs.

Pricing Plan Creation

The pricing plan content type was designed to add prices. In addition to some fields collecting general information about the plan, it was of 2 main types; Pricing by Weight and Pricing by PL SPC. So it will have rows. For each row, you mention sender and origin branch and then you set price by PL SPC and/or weight. When you set prices, you would need to set them in chunks, say 0 - 10, 10 - 20, 20 - 40, etc. When pricing would be calculated in the jobs content type, the weight, origin, and destination branch would be passed and the right price would be returned. This was a very complicated mechanism and needed a huge amount of calculation and validation checks.

Getting Jobs, Customers & Pricing to Play Well Together

These 3 entities needed a lot of coworking. Jobs are where these 3 things are integrated. In jobs, you would select the customer, pricing plan would be deduced and combining it with sender and receiver branch and weight ranges, the price would be calculated. There were several other conditions like once automatic calculation kicks in, users can override the value through manual entry. However, for that, a marker needs to be set which would show up during the job view. Safe to say, these three things were extremely complicated parts of the project, but other features were not too far behind!

Manifests & Connotes

When a job passes from branch to branch, various manifests and connotes are created. Each manifest and connote can hold multiple jobs as a part of the shipment. We employed and created a full blow custom field type and custom selection widget for this as the client had in mind a very specific way of doing this and we were to do it exactly like that.

Job, Manifests, Connote PDF Generation

At each stage, Jobs, Manifests and Connotes needed to be exported as PDFs. These PDFs needed to look exactly like what they used to use, which was detailed tabular structure and a custom barcode printed against each. We made use of MPDF library with some patches and custom enhancements in order to set certain style elements into the PDF. The process of setting this was very time consuming and complicated, but we managed it very well in the end.

Bar Code Scanning

Client wanted a mechanism through which the PDFs generated would need to be scanned, and there would be an interface, which would allow bulk updating of certain properties. For example, a client would open the interface, scan a few manifests and connotes and then mention what change was needed, for example updating the branch and check in status. Once done and saved, all those properties for the manifests and connotes for which barcodes were scanned would update all together. This was again a very complicated process.

Quickbooks Integration

Finally, the entire system was to be integrated with the Quickbooks software which the client used to keep his finance and accounts. This means export of customers, pricing plans, jobs pricing and status, connotes and manifests data. This was again a huge and very lengthy task, in which we needed to custom code the API and finally check and fix the calculation errors through a det of dummy data. The nature of the data was very varied and there were an extremely large number of parameters that needed to be taken into consideration.

Admin Management Screens for Customers, Jobs, Pricing Plans, Manifests and Connotes

The Client needed a detailed management area where they could view these data based on certain filters and complex combinations of display parameters. For example, jobs which passed a certain date would be colour coded for better display and filtering.

From the client’s perspective, the main success of this portal has been the ease of managing a business which till that point was extremely difficult as things were mainly manual. Also, the various stakeholders involved (customers, warehouse managers, drivers) were extremely satisfied not only with this entire thing being managed and operated online but also the extremely intuitive and easy-to-use UI/UX, especially some of them not being very tech-savvy.

This was a very complex project, and as they say, the more the complexity, the sweeter the success tastes. We were finally relieved to see that the client was extremely satisfied and pleasantly surprised by some of the features that we implemented, the client was not even sure that it could be implemented in a usable fashion. End result, happy customer and happy us!

Wards Testimonial

The project was conceived as an effort to replace manual operations with an online automated system. The project demanded a deep understanding of the company operations and freight handling, in order to be able to suggest effective solutions. Through our discovery workshops, we were able to discuss and work around various challenges posed, and we were able to deliver a solution that reduced backend operation cost by 25%, reduced error margin by a staggering 65% and improved profit margin by about 12%.

2 years of development, ongoing maintenance

Wards Testimonial II

The main challenge of the project was to gain an in-depth understanding of the entire business operations and workflow. Since this project required an in-depth solutions design, our team needed to understand exactly how the offline operations are carried out and grasp the challenges they were facing in each step. Once we absorbed the workflow, we needed to design an efficient solution that would be robust enough to handle the traffic and job load.

Heading

Reduced backend operation cost by 25%

Outcome

With the cumbersome offline processes replaced with streamlines online processes, the backend operations cost reduced drastically

Heading

Reduced error margin by 65%

Outcome

Online operations introduced automations, thereby reducing the manual errors drastically making the system more efficient.

Heading

Improved profit margin by about 12%

Outcome

With reduced timeline and improved efficiency, the profit margin increased significantly.

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Prototyping

Enterprise Drupal Development

MVP Development

Product-Market Fit

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Amazon AWS

Browserstack

Confluence

CSS

Drupal 8

GIT

HTML

JIRA

jQuery

MySQL

PHP

Postman

Transportation & Logistics

Implementation of Online Auction and RFQ Platform for Iron Steel Products

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:39:58 +0000

Implementation of Online Auction and RFQ Platform for Iron Steel Products admin Tue, 01/10/2023 - 21:39

Implementation of online auction and RFQ platform for Iron & steel products including detailed portfolio management

Construction & Manufacturing

Middle East

Extensive portfolio management functionality

Online auction implementation

Products and RFQ management

UI/UX development

Performance optimization

Drupal 8/9

Apache SOLR

Bitbucket

Amazon AWS

The client reached out to us with a partially built site, as their development team was not able to complete the remaining work due to some issues. The client was looking for a development team to pick up the development, instead of building from scratch. The client had a limited timeline, as they were already behind schedule and they planned to launch the site in one of the largest construction and manufacturing expos in the country. They reached out to a number of teams, but none were keep to pick up on an existing codebase. Our team, however, were up for the challenge. We did a detailed discovery workshop, and laid down a clear development plan that included enough time for code review and reverse engineering.

The portal is a marketplace for Iron and Steel products - to connect sellers and buyers together. The goal of the website is to bridge the gap between sellers and buyers of iron and steel products in micro (C2C) or macro (B2B) scales. Service Providers register on the site and can create Products, Auctions, RFQs, Tender Sales. There are various intricate interactions between these three components, and a detailed membership module delegating permissions based on membership levels. Also the site needed to be fully bi lingual, in Farsi (RTL) and English. This is Phase I of the project which we completed. There will be 3 more phases, which we shall start working on, which includes email / SMS based notification alert and custom subscription creation, full blown E-commerce and marketplace feature and Social Media Integration. All these considerations needed to be kept in mind while building the structure and the background work.

The major requirements of the site can be mainly grouped into the following:

User Account Creation & Registration Mechanism

Users should be able to create accounts. We had to replace the email based registration system to a phone number based registration system. The users need to add their phone numbers and OTP will be sent to them. Once they add in the OTP, they will be asked to set their password and get in. To change the password also, they need to add in Phone Number and validate the OTP. We used Twillio as OTP service for the supported countries, and used a private SMS service for Iran, which the client preferred. Once in, users can set their profile data and can use start to create products and other entities.

Products

This is the main building block of the other entities - RFQs, Tender Sales and Auctions. User needs to add at least one product before they can create other entities. The product had a huge number of specification fields, and they needed to organised as cleanly as possible. We employed Field Collection, Field Collection tables and host of other modules for this, in total we had around 46 fields to be created in the product content type itself. We also employed google Maps and reverse geocoding for the Load Location field.

RFQs

Sellers could then, once they had added some products, create RFQs or Request for Quotes. This had a complicated feature of either choosing a product, or be able to custom product right in that content type, which needed to be multivalued. Main complication was that the number of fields were huge, around 46. We solved this problem using Inline Entity form and Field Collection AJAX modules. The RFQs also had an end date, and users could bid on the RFQ till the end date. The RFQ bid feature was implemented using the comments entity on the RFQ node and a few custom tables to track pricing.

Auctions

The Auction feature had all the features of normal auction. Sellers could create auction and mention the products he wants to auction (that the seller created). He would also mention an end date of the auction and a base price. The users will then bid on the auction. This bid feature was fully custom implemented, and users can only bid an amount that is greater than the last bid. At the end of the timeframe, the user with highest bid amount will be the winner.

Membership Feature

We used membership Entity as the base for this feature and then extended the work through our custom modules. The membership Entity module declares everything through Entity API making it very much extendible. We implemented additional permission checks and associated roles to award and revoke membership. Also, the membership page is integrated to registration. As user sets their password, they are taken to membership page, asking them if they would subscribe. They have the option to skip this step though.

Private Chat

The chat feature was implemented using the Drupalchat module. We used the code and forked the module to add our necessary customisations. Need to heavily customise it, but nevertheless the base work has been very helpful and time saver. In Phase II plan is to use nodejs and the chat driver, right now it's using ajax polling method.

The project was extremely complicated. It had lots of layers and main challenge was to keep it steering ahead without creating logical blobs for us. The architecture needed to be very robust to be able to handle the features of not just this phase, but also upcoming 3 Phases, which the client has already briefed us beforehand. We did careful planning and divided the tasks into sprints. Each and every architectural decision was carefully evaluated ensuring it will play well long term and it will not conflict with a future solution that we need to implement. Eventually all turned out to be good, and the client was extremely happy with the functionalities, backend and overall communication and responsiveness of out team. The project was a success! Time to get moving with the rest of the phases which we are already into.

Foolad 24 Testimonial

Initiating a project from scratch and completing it with perfection is challenging. But getting involved in a project midway, with minimal documentation and in limited time is a completely different challenge. Throughout this project, our team demonstrated skill, commitment and technical expertise as they were able to complete the project in stipulated timeline and budget, even though they faced an uphill battle in assimilating the existing codebase and workflow, especially without any proper documentation.

Fixed Scope, ongoing maintenance

Foolad 24 Testimonial II

The main challenge of the project was the the fact that we needed to pick up and work on a half built set up. The existing development team also left behind minimum documentation and we needed to reverse engineer a lot of the features in order to deconstruct the working. The goal of the project was to create a marketplace for Iron and Steel products. The Service Providers will be able to register, and create their profile. Once done, they can create products, RFQs, Auctions and Tender Sales. Buyers can come and search these, and contact the sellers directory through call/chat. If they need to place the bids on the RFQs or Auctions, they need to create an account in the site. The sellers will need to subscribe to membership levels and based on that, they would have certain access to certain features of the site.

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Prototyping

MVP Development

Product Design Strategy

Support & Maintenance

Team Augmentation

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Amazon AWS

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

CSS

Drupal 8

Drupal 9

GIT

HTML

jQuery

MySQL

PHP

Selenium

Construction & Manufacturing

Implementation of legal compliance assessment portal

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 17:42:20 +0000

Implementation of legal compliance assessment portal admin Tue, 01/10/2023 - 17:42

Implementation of a legal compliance assessment portal, that includes an in-depth assessment mechanism and graphical reporting insights

Legal & Compliance

In-depth user registration Journey

Statistics & graphical analytics report

Assessment & question bank mechanism implementation

Backend development

Frontend implementation

UI/UX design

SEO & performance optimization

Drupal 8

Amazon AWS

Elasticsearch

Sendgrid

Highcharts Integration

The client contacted us after going through our case studies, and they has a very rough outline of the requirement. But the timeline seemed extremely tight, and to be able to hit it, we needed to move fast. Discussions were done, and everything was finalised fast. We began with a very short discovery workshop, and kickstarted development. The client selected us because of they were extremely impressed with our effective technical suggestions, positive approach and clear communication.

The client was a startup in the compliance space. With over 15 years of AML/Compliance background, the client along with his partner set out to create a revolutionary online assessment portal, that would be used by financial organisations for training and certification of their workforce.

This portal is a legal compliance assessment portal. The main purpose of this portal is to test and measure user's legal compliance knowledge quotient as compared to their competitors in different job roles, age groups, work domains and demographics. The project needed to be ready quickly (MVP was to be launched in a matter on months), as during that time, a few competitors of the client were working in a similar space, and the client wanted to have the early mover advantage in the market.

A Question bank, where admin can create questions for use in the test

Questions should have a category (again admin managed), a difficulty quotient (easy, moderate, hard, difficult). Questions can be of different types - like True/False, Image/Video questions, Multi-choice, option mapping etc. Each question was supposed to have different marks for the correct answers and an optional negative marking for wrong answers.

Questions Mapped to Proper Categories

Each Question, as mentioned above were supposed to be mapped to categories. Also, as mentioned above each question had a difficulty quotient. Now difficulty quotient calculation was of two modes - static & dynamic. The static mode was where an admin explicitly selected a difficulty quotient. As the test progresses and a substantial number of users have taken the test, the admin should have an option to select a category and mark questions for dynamic difficulty quotient calculation. Once they flipped a option switch, a dynamic difficulty level was calculated for each questions in each category based on correct response to the number of appearance ratio and all questions from that category were awarded a dynamic difficulty quotient.

In-depth Quiz Roll Out Mechanism

Quiz roll out mechanism needed to be incorporated. Admin could create and roll out quizzes as and when required. Each quiz could be of different types - static questions, where admin picked the questions manually from the question bank, and dynamic questions where questions were assigned to a quiz based on a pattern. For this admin needed to mention the number of categories and number of questions from each category. here there will be a shuffling of difficulty. A dynamic calculation mechanism will allow the quiz to be having varied difficulty level sections for different quizzes. So two users taking a quiz can get a difficult section A and other can get a relatively easy section B, but that will be then compensated by aa easy section B for first user and a difficult section B for second user. SO in other words, users might get sections of varied difficulty but overall difficulty of the test remains constant.

A Detailed Statistics for Admin and Users Based on Various Criteria Like Age Group, Profession and Demographics

Another important part was the statistics part. There was a leaderboard section where an user taking the test can see his ranking. Also, he sees about 15 graphs measuring his score against his peers across different age groups, job roles, educational qualifications and demographics. All test takers fills out the informations related to age groups, job roles etc while they register and then information is used at the end of the test to roll out the statistics.

Advanced Graphical Representation of Data

Also the client required different admin graphs, like questions appearance per category for automated test creation, total tests taken, total number users started the test but not completed it etc. Also, each registered user can access various graphs that would show comparison of their performance across various factors. There graphs are for general test performance, as well as their performance per test.

The project, inspite of having an extremely steep timeline, hit the market earlier than expected. This gave a huge competitive advantage to the client. Also, the client initially did not have much idea regarding the Drupal backend, found it extremely easy to manage. They were very happy with our tech stack suggestion and pleased to see the complete control they had over the questions and assessment management. Also, the little admin testing mechanism we provided proved to be very helpful for the backend team to take various tests and make sure that the quizzes work as expected.

Impressed by our team's technical competence, the association continued. Once the product was live, market testing and user feedbacks revealed more features which we continued to develop in phases. Also, we were in charge of the portal maintenance and provide support to the backend team.

MyCOmplianceIQ Testimonial

During the initial days of the project, we had hit several roadblocks. Since the MVP was supposed to be developed quickly (before one of their competitors launched their product), we were forced to begin the implementation without freezing the complete scope. As a result, we faced real threat of technical debt buildup, and missing the deadline. But our team handled all the challenges maturely and the final product not only fulfilled the scope, but the project was completed before time. The outcome was 15% reduction is overall cost and 3x more customer acquisition through early mover advantage.

15 months of development, ongoing maintenance

MyCOmplianceIQ Testimonial II

There were a lot of challenges we faced with this project. The basis of this project was laid out by the quiz module, which has already done a good job and the module is very flexible as well. Most of the requirements of this project needed us to extend that to a very large extent, in order to provide the necessary complex functionality that the client wanted. For example, they needed that each test will have a certain category and difficulty level composition of questions. So each test will have 25% each from 4 categories, but then all the questions will have a 25% each from each difficulty level. The difficulty level might vary from level to level, but the overall difficulty composition must be the same. So some might have a tough Category A, and others might have a tough category B, but overall test difficulty feels shall remain the same. This is just one instance, and there were numerous such requirements which made the project very challenging. Another challenging feature was the comparison graphs. This site compares a staggering amount of data, and there are around 62 comparison graphs in this. We implemented the awesome Highcharts API for this, but this required a lot of research and computation and some advanced mysql query on our part for getting the data ready to be fed to Highcharts. Also, the Highcharts API was used extensively to change the look and feel of those graphs.

Heading

15% reduction is cost

Outcome

We were able to complete the project earlier than the planned timeline, and hence there was a 15% reduction in overall cost.

Heading

3x more customer acquisition

Outcome

Because of the early mover advantage, the client was able to launch the product before his competitors, resulting in more customer acquisition.

Heading

In-depth assessment mechanism

Outcome

we developed a powerful assessment platform, that could be easily controlled through the backend, giving more flecibility to the overall platform management.

API & Microservices

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Prototyping

MVP Development

Product Design Strategy

Product-Market Fit

Support & Maintenance

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Amazon AWS

Browserstack

Confluence

Drupal 8

GIT

Headless Drupal

JIRA

JMeter

MySQL

PHP

Postman

Vue.js

Legal & Compliance

Implementation of an online landlord reference verification system

admin — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 11:46:40 +0000

Implementation of an online landlord reference verification system admin Wed, 01/04/2023 - 11:46

Implementation of an online landlord reference verification system through automation and a centralized rental history database

Real Estate

United States

In depth verification system design

Hassle free user flow

Simplistic UI/UX

Frontend development

Backend implementation

Process design

Drupal 7/8

Bitbucket

Docker

Browserstack

The client came to know about us through Linkedin, and they eventually got in touch with us with their requirement. Our technical team evaluated the requirement, and we held a series of meetings with the client's team in order to finalize the process design. Since MVP delivery timeline was extremely small, the client was especially concerned, and so were we. But as we went along and proposed the solutions, the client, impressed by our technical capabilities, communication and agility, confirmed our collaboration, and we began the work for the project.

The project was about building an online portal for landlord reference check conceived specifically for the single-family and multi-family property management industry. It helps landlords and property managers easily request and provide landlords references about their tenants online. It is a fastest and best-in-class, solution that makes requesting landlord references and providing landlord references extremely fast, simple, and secure.

This portal is an online landlord reference verification system. The client wanted to have a system in place where a landlord can request a reference from the previous landlord of a tenant regarding different security and behavioral aspects of the tenant to make sure the tenant is fit to be allowed to stay at his/her property.

Here's the main workflow of the project, as designed by our architects.

Tenant provides his details and present landlord registers and feeds the data onto the system

The tenant will provide the name and email ID of the past landlord. The present landlord will go into the system and needs to register a request for reference. Once he registers, he can fill out a form with the details of the property, his own contact details and will enter the name and email ID of the landlord he is requesting information from.

Past landlord receives notification and submits a reference

Once he submits the form, an email will be sent to the past landlord. From the email sent, the past landlord can click on the link and come to the site. There are two cases. If the past landlord is already registered, he will see a login form from which he can login and then fill out the verification form. If he is not already registered in the site, he sees an additional verification screen, where he needs to confirm his authenticity by entering the email. This ensures that someone can’t randomly copy the verification link and gain access. once the past landlords completes this step he can then fill out the information form and submit reference. The system then at the end of this step, prompts him to register if he is not already a member of the site.

Detailed search mechanism to view feedbacks by other landlord

There is a detailed site mechanism for the submitted references. Once you search by tenant name, past landlord name or requesting landlord name, you see a stripped down version of the submitted references. To view the details of the submitted references, user needs to enter the date of birth as well. This is done to ensure that one who is searching has a valid reason to do so, and also that he has the legitimate information to access the search results. The references which is either submitted, requested by the current user gets displayed in the full view by default.

Other advanced features

There are other advanced methods like creating a digital signature (which subsequently gets emailed as attachment), a detailed PDF report generation which is emailed to the requester as well as sender.

The project turned out to be great. The backend and configuration flexibility that came with using a framework like drupal shone bright and the client was very happy with the product. There was a month-long beta period for this product and the client received some very positive feedback.

Renterinc Testimonial

Through careful planing and skilful execution, it is possible to execute even the most complex tasks, easily. It is with this belief, our team took up an otherwise impossible task of releasing the MVP for this project in an extremely small timeframe. From UI/UX designing to functionality implementation, the MVP was launched in record time, and the client was able to get the much needed market validation. Eventually, subsequent phases added more features and final product boasts of a simplified user journey, intuitiuve UI/UX and a relatively simple but powerful admin backend.

Fixed scope, ongoing maintenance

Renterinc Testimonial II

The major challenge for the project was the MVP timeline. We needed to be extra planned, and a lot of the project processes needed to happen in parallel. Also, it needed an extremely good communication and our team was up foe the challenge. Out architectural planning team was able to come up with a feasible plan, and out development team ensure that it was followed, and we could roll our the MVP in time. Once MVP was rolled out, rest of the project was developed in phases and we eventually completed the entire project.

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Prototyping

MVP Development

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

CSS

Drupal 8

GIT

HTML

JIRA

JMeter

jQuery

MySQL

PHP

Real Estate

Digital capability augmentation of a Fortune 500 construction & manufacturing company

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:43:34 +0000

Digital capability augmentation of a Fortune 500 construction & manufacturing company admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:43

How we achieved a significant digital capability augmentation of a Fortune 500 construction & manufacturing company, through strategy, consulting & solutions implementation

Construction & Manufacturing

Uk & Ireland

Ideation & requirement evaluation

Drupal 8 to 9 upgrade

Data Migration

Drupal 8/9 custom module development

Drupal 8/9 site building & frontend

Support & AMC

Drupal 8

Apache SOLR

Acquia Cloud

GITLabs

JIRA

Confluence

Browserstack

When the client got in touch with us, they were struggling with a set of major issues, that were severely crippling their content management experience, leading to increased cost and time wastage. Also, their existing digital set up was inefficient and unreliable. After carefully evaluating our background and portfolio, the client went ahead with our team.

Wes not only solved all their immediate issues in a matter of months, the expertise and the knowledge of our team shone through. They already had several vendors working on their portals, but the client was now looking for a team that can provide a better consulting & strategy in order to improve their existing digital infrastructure. Eventually they decided to entrust us with the task of management and continuous feature development their entire digital setup.

After 4+ years, we continue to manage and maintain their entire set up, bringing in effective digital strategy and continue to improve their digital experience platform.

A multinational Fortune 500 company that designs, manufactures, and distributes materials and solutions for the construction, mobility, healthcare, and industrial markets. It specializes in flat glass, thermal insulation, solar control, light transmission, interior decoration as well as bulletproof and fireproof glass areas. The company also offers gypsum and insulation, mortars, pipe systems for drinking water and sewage systems, steel products for highways and roadways, and more. In addition, it supplies ceramics raw materials used in a variety of markets.

The client initially contacted us for fixing some major issues that were causing major issues for the backend content management. Once we were able to solve these issues, next, the client contracted us to build an internal portal for their 1,67,000 global employees across 70 different countries. The internal portal was supposed to be a shares redeeming platform for the company’s employees. We took up the challenge of designing and developing an efficient, performant, and professional portal that could sustain the huge data and concurrent user activity. From thereon, we forged a solid partnership and what followed for the next 4 years was a series of standalone projects and enhancement work to their vast network of web platforms across various countries. The web architecture that the client has is a vast network of 150+ Drupal 8 multisite set-up and approximately 50+ separate functional Drupal 8 sites. We successfully carried on a series of at least 40+ (and ongoing) feature development over a span of 4 years.

Present in 70 countries

350 years of operation

167000 employees

Over the course of the total engagement & partnership, we helped them tackle a host of business challenges. Some notable among these are:

Realization of a complex shares redeems platform to be used by 1,67,000. It needed a robust admin section for teams across various countries to manage the redeem points and perform export, import, approval, etc. Also, it needed strong security, and validation based on their employee code and internal passcode, on top of the standard Drupal authentication. Also, the platform needed to be extremely performant, since the number of concurrent users was supposed to be extremely high.
Built with Drupal, the present setup of the sites was quite static and a lot of the page layouts were non-flexible. It caused tremendous trouble for the backend team, especially considering the vastness of the website network and how distributed the teams were across multiple countries. Our team strategized the rehaul of the pages across their most notable brands and provided a component- architecture. We made it possible for them to mix and match from a vast network of components, and create their own content pages with zero developer interference.
Another huge challenge they were facing was being issued with content moderation. With such a vast array of content rolled out each day, they needed an extremely robust content approval and publishing mechanism on their site. They were still using a very primitive workflow. Our strategy team discussed the business requirement and after a lot of brainstorming, came up with a perfect recipe tailored to perfection to their business needs.
At the time we took over, they were following a very inefficient translation and multilingual mechanism. It was prone to errors and was not covered within the content moderation process. Hence it was a cause of a huge headache for various stakeholders. Our team, in association with the Chief Media Strategist from their company, discussed how to streamline the process and introduce the content moderation flow to the translation mechanism as well.
This company had a rich history of 350+ years. They wanted to rehaul their lackluster timeline section and for the same, they needed the suggestion of our UI/UX team. We presented them with several ideas and finally, we were able to deliver just what they needed.
Another important aspect of our ongoing partnership is technical strategy and maintenance. Since their tech setup is so large in scale, it is also prone to sudden outages and urgent bugs and issues. And we are a one-stop-shop for all their technical issues. Whatever the issue is, our technical team strategizes and solves it.
The company had a very primitive job portal that needed a massive rehaul. The job portal was slow and buggy. Also, they had different portals for different countries and it was not unified, which was causing a lot of administrative challenges. Our technical team discussed various approaches with their stakeholders and finally decided that it was time to unify all the career portals under one roof through common API integration. They chose to go ahead and integrate Talentlink API.

Over the years, our work and strategy has led to consistent improvement to their digital platform. Some of the highlights are:

A more streamlined translation and multilingual experience, saving countless hours of back and forth
Better reflection of the brand, by avoiding content mistakes through a efficient content moderation mechanism
More flexibility in terms of new page rollout, through page builder mechanism, resulting in huge savings in cost and time, by avoiding long designing and development loops
Ensuring web standard compatibility and SEO friendliness
A highly performant shares platform, used by large number of internal employees, making the process fast and completely digitizes, preventing manual processing and mistakes
A much improved jobs portal solution resulting in better candidate experience - both internal and external
A continuous & efficient QA cycle, to ensure the continuous web-readiness

After 4 years of engagement and professional partnership with this client, we have emerged as a one-stop-shop for all their digital needs. We continue to work on a host of new initiatives for the company and hopefully, will continue to do so in years to come.

Saint Gobain Testimonial II

Our deep expertise in lean product development equips our team to develop better digital products, faster. We engineered a complex set of functionalities to this client's existing set up, while also revamping and replacing their inefficient and old implementations with efficient digital solutions. Through our effective DXP Consulting & Strategy, we were able to bring forward disruptive changes, including, but not limited to content experience and overall standard of the digital process. This lead to 33% reduction in overall backend issues, a massive 45% improvement in content management efficiency and over 40+ new features built and deployed improving the overall digital experience of their platform.

4+ years, Ongoing

Saint Gobain Testimonial

During the lifetime of the project, here are some of the major challenged we have faced, and successfully solved.

Realization of a complex shares redeem platform to be used by the company’s 1,67,000 employees across the globe.
Strategization & implementation of an extensive and flexible page builder mechanism
Implementation of effective content moderation flow, as per the business logic laid down by the company’s backend team
Improve the existing translation and multilingual mechanism drastically to suit the requirement laid down by the content team
Building an interactive timeline, representing the company’s 350 years of history
Achieve complete migration from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9
Data migration from sub-sites built in other technologies to Drupal 9
Constant strategy and consulting in order to come up with best digital solutions for day to day challenges reported by various stakeholders.
Implementation of an end to end job portal, based on talentlink API
Massive UI/UX improvement as per guidelines laid down by the branding team
In depth review and implementation in order to make the entire site SEO friendly and compatible with latest web standards

Heading

33% Reduction in Overall Backend Issues

Outcome

We were able identify and tackle their backend issues effectively, leading to a faster deployment cycle and less regression issues.

Heading

45% Improvement in Content Management Efficiency

Outcome

The content management solutions that we built resulted in better content moderation solutions, leading to faster content approval process.

Heading

40+ New Features Built and Deployed

Outcome

The new features we built and deployed led to an overall improvement to the digital experience of their platform.

Continuous Monitoring

DXP Strategy & Consulting

Enterprise Drupal Development

Incident Management

Minor Enhancements & Bug Fixes

Performance Optimization

Product Scaling

Support & Maintenance

UI Design & Implementation

UX Consulting & Audit

Web Development

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

CSS

Drupal 8

Drupal 9

GIT

HTML

jQuery

MySQL

PHP

Postman

Construction & Manufacturing