Confluence

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

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:33:44 +0000

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company admin Tue, 01/10/2023 - 21:33

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company through effective DXP strategy & consulting

Online Publishing

USA, Canada

In depth CMS implementation, content moderation flow, advertisement module

Drupal 8

Domain Access Suite

Elasticsuite

Docker

Digital Ocean

Github

Confluence

The client is a reputed online publishing and business listing company. They were running sites with primitive proprietary CMSs and was facing increasing difficulty to maintain these websites. Particularly the three above mentioned websites were different versions of the same website as these are affiliate sites of the same parent company. There were three major focuses on the development - Ease of content editing, a very advanced advertising management feature and an impressive look and feel with interactive elements.

The website was running with primitive proprietary CMS and content editors were facing difficulty to maintain the content publishing to individual sub-sites. Particularly those websites were different versions of the same website (multisite) and were affiliated sites of the parent company.

Advance Content Management Features

The client wanted to have advanced content management features which shall be able to publish content in one or different sites (we call domains) by simply selecting while creating the content.

Detailed Content Flow

Also, there was supposed to be a detailed content flow wherein editors were able to create contents and submit for approval. Then an approver can go in make recommendations to the editors and this process can go on back and forth till all is good and the the publisher can go forward and publish the content to the site, at this point the content becomes actually visible to the end users.

Content Storage

Also each and every change made to a piece of content was to be stored as revisions. When required, publishers could revert back to an old revision.

Advanced Advertisement Module

There was an advanced advertisement module we created. The client had different 3rd party paid ads from various categories. Each of those ads had various tags. We needed to pull those ads which belongs to the ads in the present page being viewed and being able to be dynamically pulled in. So at a particular page, only the most relevant ads were supposed to be displayed.

We built a CMS with features like publishing content in different domains and implemented the facility where content can be stored as a revision and can be reverted back to old revision, advertising management feature, advanced advertisement module and an elegant look and feel with interactive elements. The website had different 3rd party paid ads from various categories where every ad had various tags. We required to pull those ads which belonged to the ads in the present page being viewed and being able to be dynamically pulled in. So at a particular page, only the most relevant ads were supposed to be displayed.

Storebrand Testimonial

Once you have found the product-market fit, it's time to scale up your product. By virtue of our team's extensive knowledge in digital product scaling, we were able to effectively assist the client to grow their online publishing platform into a mature product. Their team lacked technical expertise and knowledge and we were able to commission a dedicated development team for them in a matter of days, which helped them to achieve significant organic traffic growth, increase in customer retention and growth in advertisement revenues through our consulting & digital strategy.

2+ years of continuous development, ongoing support & maintenance

Storebrand Testimonial II

Cloud & DevOps

Continuous Monitoring

Digital Design & Branding

Enterprise Drupal Development

Incident Management

Minor Enhancements & Bug Fixes

Performance Optimization

Product Scaling

Support & Maintenance

Team Augmentation

UX Consulting & Audit

Web Development

Angular

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

Confluence

Docker

Drupal 8

Elasticsearch

GIT

Headless Drupal

JIRA

MySQL

Postman

Media, Entertainment & Publishing

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 edtech platform for online tutor scheduling

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:47:12 +0000

Implementation of an edtech platform for online tutor scheduling admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:47

Implementation of an edtech platform for online tutor scheduling with in-depth live class mechanism

Edtech

Belgium, Netherlands

Ideation & project roadmap development

Drupal custom module development

Drupal site building & frontend

Support & AMC

Performance optimization

Drupal 8

Apache SOLR

Acquia Cloud

GITLabs

JIRA

Confluence

Browserstack

The client's team had several discussions with us where we interpreted the the market feedbacks we had received into feature set, and they engaged us as a technical consultant to their project. Once the requirement set as hardened, and then development roadmap was clearly laid down, we were obviously the first choice as a development team, considering our contribution to the project so far.

The client is a young and dynamic edtech startup that originated from a varied group of tutors and academics who offer tutoring, both online and in-classroom setup. Headquartered in Ghent, they are active throughout Belgium and the Netherlands. Since 2013, this platform brings students and tutors together. More than 16,000 students have already found a private tutor through their platform.

The portal is an online platform for students to book classes from various tutors of diverse backgrounds. Students can search for tutors and classes based on various filters and criteria. These classes can be both online via web conference, or home tutoring.

This project was meant to be a website for students to book classes from various tutors online. The tutors would register online and fill up various information and their resume. They would then go through an approval process and once verified, their listing would start to appear on the site. Students can search based on different criteria using an extensive filtering mechanism. They can then book the two modes of classes - either online or offline (if a tutor has added this option to his profile).

Then the student makes a payment deposit as per selected tutor as per selected time slot and per hour rate of the tutor. And once done, the payment is escrowed to the tutor, after he enters his bank details, IBAN and BIC details. Another great functionality which we implemented here is the group class feature. Any tutor can start the group class and can mention how many students can be accommodated in one group class. And then students start to register for the class till it is full. There are various complex discount calculations which a student is entitled to if refers another student to the group as there is a feature to get referral discounts for referring other students to the group class. Some of the processes, especially referral discount calculation, were very complex, and our team of experienced backend developers successfully handled those challenges and went above and beyond every expectation.

Here's a gist of some of the functionalities we built grounds up, as per market feedback and analysis, and discussion with the client's product team.

Group Class Mechanism - The client wanted to implement a new feature called group class. So instead of an one on one session, a tutor can create a class at some future date, and allow multiple students to sign up for the same class. This was supposed to be an extension of the existing class system, but would need a special wage and fees calculation mechanism in place.
Referral Credits & Discounts - Client also wanted to start a referral mechanism programme. Here, one student can refer another student to join the site. Such users who join in, become the referral of the invitee, and any subsequent classes they purchase will entitle invitee for some discounts on the class the invitee purchases. Also, this referral mechanism was supposed to be multi level, instead of one level. So if a referred student further refers to another one, the invitee of this referred student also gains a referral credit/discount.
Online Video Conferencing for Online Tutoring Classes - Also, the client needed some enhancements to the online video conferencing feature on top of the existing system.
Design Improvements - There were quite a few pages, which were pretty basic and did not uphold the spirit of the site. The client discussed this matter with our designing team and engaged us to revamp and improve the design elements across the site to make it look more attractive.

The series of features we implemented not only helped the client gain more customers, but it also allowed them to expand to new markets, with considerable revenue boost. We forged a strong professional alliance and continue to support them for all their technical needs,

Bijleshuis Testimonial

While the client already had a MVP launched and they had gained considerable market insights, they needed a technical partner co-work with them to translate these into a solid phased development plan. Our team was able to evaluate the market feedbacks and design robust solutions that transformed customer journey and user experience. The features we implemented led to an overall increase in customer retention by 20%, paid customer conversion by 30% and led to an overall improvement in backend efficiency.

1.5+ years, phased development

Bijleshuis Testimonial II

Heading

Increase in customer retention by 20%

Outcome

With more user friendly process design, the portal became easier to use and the customer retention increased considerably.

Heading

Paid customer conversion by 30%

Outcome

The market analysis revealed some must have features, and once these were implemented, the site saw a surge in paid customer number and overall improved conversion rate.

Heading

Overall improvement in backend efficiency

Outcome

Through the feature optimizations we did, the backend efficiency increases and led to increase in profit.

API & Microservices

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Design & Branding

Digital Prototyping

Performance Optimization

Product Scaling

Support & Maintenance

Team Augmentation

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Browserstack

Confluence

Docker

Drupal 9

Elasticsearch

GIT

Google Cloud

Headless Drupal

JIRA

JMeter

MySQL

Postman

React

Selenium

Edtech

Online chef discovery & hiring network implementation

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:45:11 +0000

Online chef discovery & hiring network implementation admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:45

Online chef discovery & hiring network Implementation Including portfolio creation, event management & live chat

Professional Services & Directory Listing, Food & Beverages

USA, Canada

Availability & extensive calendar search, slot booking, events handling

Drupal 9

Elastic Search

Amazon AWS

Platform.sh

Browserstack

Cloudflare

The portal is for foodies and for people willing to get the best taste of dishes made by the expert chefs to search, discover, and book a private chef all around the world – online or from a mobile phone. It is a platform for hiring a chef based on location, distance, event, cuisine type, diet type, experience level, availability, and hourly rate. Its basic purpose is to hire/book chefs for cooking/providing food for various events ranging from weddings to potlucks. It is also a very good platform for chefs to feature themselves and their skills with an authentic rating system to promote their profiles highlighting their achievements and awards.

The project was envisioned to make booking chefs easy. And it was just not booking one chef, it wanted to bring in a concept of events, where users can hire multiple chefs and then be able to discuss everything and share information under one unified space. There needed to be a payment mechanism for starting such an event and then an option to cancel an event and get the booking fee refunded into a virtual wallet. Apart from that there would be search based on chef availability, discussion board and profile creation.

The project requirements can be broadly classified into the following aspects:

Design & Conceptualisation

The site needed to be designed and conceptualised by us. The client came to us with certain ideas in mind, but wanted us to actually help them come up with a UI/UX that would be appropriate and a flow that will be easy for non technical users. Our team of creative designers have set a very high standards for themselves already and hence their challenge was to keep up with it. We finally, after a lot of discussion within the team and with the client gave the site a perfect flow that will be appropriate for it's targeted customer base.

Registration and Profile Creation

Users needed to be able to register, either as Chef or as Customer. The registration form would contain same fields, but after registration there would be different fields for each profile. Chef had lot many fields, and this needed to be presented cleanly and very professionally as Chef's public profile which other's could go in and visit.

Events Space

The client wanted to have a space where customer and chefs can discuss and share information regarding the event. We came up with the concept of event. So a Chef can't be directly booked. A customer needs to first create a event. Once he creates can event, he gets an event space. Event space is sort of like a wall feed, and showing details about the event in the sidebar. Users can then search for chef and invite chefs for the event. If a Chef accepts the invite, he or she joins the event space. but chatting can still not begin. Customer now needs to pay for the event (an one time fee) and then once payment is made, the event space opens up. All the parties can upload documents, share information and chat by creating posts. Once an event expires, the chat can no longer be accessed.

Event Cancellation & Refund to Wallet

We implemented a concept of digital wallet, where refunded payment will be called back. It could be used for the next payment for events. The wallet money could not be withdrawn, but later on, in Phase II plan is to integrate this to user points and then be able to purchase point credits using this amount.

Chef Availability Calendar & Search

An extensive search mechanism needed to be integrated. We used Search API + SOLR backend. But we also needed to search based on availability of Chefs. For Chefs time slots, we used Opening Hours module, which nicely provided the slots and then wrote it's integration for search API. The system worked great. We provided Facets through Search API Facets module.

The project was a great success, the client was extremely satisfied with the end result. The design that we produced was highly appreciated and the functionality was smooth, and very easy to use and understand even for non technical users, who was a big target audience for the client - the Chefs.

Potluck Chefs Testimonial

Owing to our expertise in product development lifecycle, we were able to guide this client in building and launching their product from an idea into a fully refined marked tested product. From the outset, the goal of the product was to quickly work on and release an MVP, and from thereon release features in phases towards achieving a product-market fit. Our team assisted the client throughout this journey, and enabled the client save a lot of cost and gain significant competitive advantage through an early MVP release, leading to faster market penetration and revenue growth.

MVP in 12 weeks, 2+ years of continuous development

Potluck Chefs Testimonial II

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Design & Branding

Digital Prototyping

MVP Development

Performance Optimization

Product Design Strategy

Product-Market Fit

Team Augmentation

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Amazon AWS

Angular

Browserstack

Confluence

Drupal 8

Elasticsearch

GIT

Headless Drupal

MySQL

Postman

Food & Beverages

Implementation of a state of the art fan builder

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

Implementation of a state of the art fan builder admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:43

End-to-end platform upgradation and implementation of an advanced custom fan configuration wizard for a US based ceiling fan retailer

Retail & Ecommerce

USA

UI/UX redesign

Backend Development

Ubercart to Drupal Commerce Migration

Fan builder wizard implementation

Performance optimization & SEO

Drupal 7

Elasticsearch

Acquia Cloud

GITLabs

JIRA

Confluence

Browserstack

The client initially started looking for a development team to help them fix some backend issues that their marketing team had raised. They spoke to multiple vendors and did extensive calls with them to understand the company background and technical capabilities. During once such call with our team, they brought up a few fundamental issues like UI/UX improvement and fan builder layout, and we suggested them some strategies for improvement that we already researched out during our review of the portal. This impressed them, and as the discussion progressed, it became evident that the present set up was not optimal and needed to be replaced in favour of a better system. Our team was chosen because we were able to identify these issues first hand, and instead if just focussing on the requirement that they gave us, were able to bring something more to the table that had the potential to create a deep business impact.

The client is America's largest Independent Ceiling Fan Retailer, since 1979. They manufacture their own brand of ceiling fans and these are sold through their 30-corporately owned retail locations, 10-independently owned & operated dealer locations, select lighting showrooms and online through their corporate website, which we were contracted to rebuild, redesign and improve.

When the client initially reached out to us, the client’s portal had a vast array of fans and fan accessories, but the portal was poorly designed with a primitive and slow fan builder wizard. This resulted in a high bounce rate and low customer engagement, resulting in steep revenue loss. Moreover, they were running a web store based on Drupal 6 + Ubercart, which was already an old technology and a nightmare in terms of management and backend operations. During the discovery workshops conducted by us, we evaluated and identified all the bottlenecks successfully, and proposed necessary solution to the client. We were entrusted with the project, and our team successfully transformed the portal into a modern online fan store - fast and easy to navigate, with a state of the art fan builder that was extremely easy to use. Once main development was completed, we were given charge of maintaining the portal and ongoing feature improvements.

44 store locations

7000 fan models

40 years in business

To begin with, it seemed the main issue was the lack of a coherent and effective UI/UX. The UX was old and not appealing to retain customers, leading to an extremely high bounce rate. But a deeper review also made it clear that the backend architecture was old, and was not capable of handling the growing data for new models and accessories. So an backend upgradation to Drupal 7 + Drupal commerce (from Drupal 6 + Ubercart) was agreed upon.

Their present website consisted of about 30,000 products including fan bundles, fans and accessories like light kits, downrods etc. We too up the daunting task of migrating these from Ubercart to Drupal Commerce. While migrating was taking place, the client's marketing team also wanted to incorporate a better product bundle mechanism, with features like option for admin to mark if a product can be individually bought or only available as a part of the bundle, product single price as well as bundle price, product bundle discounts as per bundle configuration.

Also, the general site migration needed to be done from Drupal 6 - 7 with all contents (about 10,000 nodes and blog articles).

However, as mentioned earlier one of the most important feature that now needed to be re-designed and re-developed was the fan builder mechanism. In their present site, they had a very basic version of the fan builder, but they wanted some serious revamp of the functionality to make it more appealing and more GUI based.

And our team was up for the challenge. We delivered a state of the art, fast and intuitive fan builder to them. Each of the steps was divided into layers and options in each layer were derived out of the choices the user made in the previous steps. Also, at the end of all the steps, the user was able to download a compiled fan image to be able to have a final look to and share it with their friends and family. Admin had full control and be able to choose which products appeared in each step and how it would vary and interact based on different user choices. Also, in the initial step, users could optionally upload an image of their own room, to see how the fan would look in their own room environment.

Needless to say, the overall UI/UX improvement we did to the portal led to an increase in conversion rate and reduced the bounce rate drastically. But we believe we created an even bigger impact through the fan builder implementation. When building a site using a framework like drupal, it’s more than just a content management system and it should be more of an advanced configuration system as well. With this new system, the client was amazed how easily they could manage not only the webstore, but the products that go into the fan builder. They could literally manage each and every aspect of the layer attributes, position of a layer over its predecessors and the discount pricing for accessories going into the fan builder. Also, the client was impressed with not only the quality of work but also the communication and improvement suggestions our team brought to the table.

Once the main development was done, we had already forged a solid relationship with the client's team. They continued to make additional development changes, and finally after several phases of development, the project entered into maintenance. We continue to maintain the portal to this day, and continue to fulfil additional feature requests that they come up with from time to time.

Dan's Fan Testimonial

We take a lot of pride in not only ensuring a flawless execution, but also smart strategy and consulting in order to solve complex technical challenges. The outdated portal the client had, negatively affected the user experience leading to a loss of revenue and customer trust. Our team not only came up with an impressive UI for the entire site and executed the entire migration flawlessly, but redesigned their legacy fan-builder setup completely. These improvements led to a 40% increase in conversion rate and brought down the bounce rate below 30%.

Phased development, ongoing maintenance

Dan's Fan Testimonial II

Based on the outcome of the discovery workshop, the major challenges that were identified were the following:

Drupal 6 was old and already end-of-life, and hence needed to be migrated to Drupal 7.
The ecommerce store needed to be ported from Ubercart (with about 30,000 fans and fan accessories) to Drupal Commerce with enhanced features.
Create a much improved version of their fan builder feature which allows visitors to compile various parts of the fan (like motor, blades, light kits, downrods) through an interactive graphical interface.
Overall UI/UX Redesign of the entire portal to make it more user friendly and interactive.

Heading

40% increase in conversion rate

Outcome

With all the backend and frontend changes, the overall performance of the portal increased, leading to an improved conversion rate.

Heading

bounce rate reduction to 30%

Outcome

With the UI/UX improvement that we did, the bounce rate reduced considerably, thus ensuring more traffic retention and increased ROI

Heading

An improved fan builder mechanism

Outcome

The fan builder was transformed completely from a old legacy system to an improved, easy to use mechanism that was loved by the customers.

Digital Prototyping

E-Commerce Strategy & Implementation

Product Design Strategy

Product Scaling

UI Design & Implementation

UX Consulting & Audit

Web Development

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

Confluence

CSS

Drupal 8

GIT

Google Cloud

HTML

JIRA

jQuery

MySQL

Retail & E-commerce