Construction & Manufacturing

Designing a Loyalty Rewards Application to Attract and Retain painters while organizing the business database.

contentauthor — Mon, 01 May 2023 05:16:44 +0000

Designing a Loyalty Rewards Application to Attract and Retain painters while organizing the business database. contentauthor Mon, 05/01/2023 - 05:16

How we developed a Product Design Strategy to create an internal application to expand the client's business through a Loyalty Rewards program.

India

Originally, the client approached us to conduct a detailed interpretation of their business idea. Our team held a discovery workshop to evaluate the client's needs and demonstrate our analytical expertise. Our extensive professional experience, in addition to the proven capabilities of our competent business analyst, positively affected the client's impression of us, which pushed them to partner with us for the development of their loyalty program.

A company that is known in the paint industry for its quality and innovative products. They offer painting services for your homes that are well-known on a worldwide scale without negatively impacting the environment or our planet. In this age of modernization, they yearn to provide their customers with paint products of the highest quality available that are well worth the money spent on them. Therefore, they pursued the best painting options available, blending foreign know-how with Indian heartedness to find the ones that best suited Indian climatic conditions and customers. It goes without saying the clients were adamant on broadening their business horizons through a rewards program for the painters.

The client already had an offline coupon system in place when they approached us for this project. However, the data was stored in such a scattered manner that their primary purpose was not being fulfilled. This pushed them to come up with the idea of building an online loyalty rewards program to keep track of their painters while attracting them more efficiently. In addition to the contractors, we had to acknowledge the importance of the distributors as well.

After much deliberation, our team designed a mechanism to divide the cities where the business was operative according to specific Tiers. Based on the city's production and sales level, it would be assigned a tier. This helped us build an effective and customized loyalty system.

We supported the client in overcoming several business challenges thanks to our collaboration and regular communication. Here's how we approached it—

We began the development process by building a complete mechanism for the end-to-end handling of coupons. We designated the generation of coupons to the backend structure while attaching the scanning of coupons to the front end. Initial testing showed issues with the accessibility of the scanning option as most of the workers involved were unskilled. To address this, our team built additional options for the manual entering of coupons.
We were required to designate a single button for the "Log In" and the "Sign Up" option, and we achieved this without jeopardizing the response time of the application. Again, we enlisted the power of our skilled developers to take care of this. They handled it proficiently and without letting the speed hinder the user experience.
At first, we proceeded with the APIs suggested by the client itself. However, that turned out to be inefficient, and the response time was longer. The importance of an appropriate API was attached to the procurement of Aadhaar information. This prompted us to conduct in-depth research to select the best-suited API, which we then suggested to the client and acquired approval.
We automated the collection of data when building the "Sign Up" process and displayed the final calculated value in the backend structure. Additionally, we verified KYC information and clarified signup points before submission. This effectively prevented data duplication and the submission of false information.
We designed a system that would classify the cities into tiers according to their production levels and sales. The reasoning behind this was to provide more scanning options and retain more contractors. Our team efficiently executed the development of this system, thereby promoting retention levels.
The client required us to build a mechanism to renew and bring the loyalty points to zero yearly without influencing the previously stored transactional information. Therefore, we designed the system to carry this out effectively every financial year.
Our development team integrated real-time payment gateways for the redemption of reward points. We also incorporated a capping mechanism that would make sure that redemption is only possible for reward points above 200. According to our system, contractors were issued immediate and upfront payments, while dealers could raise requests for the allocation of credit notes. Here, credit notes were issued to dealers in correspondence with every redemption.
Considering the importance of coordinating dealers and contractors, we designed two different tables, one for the benefit of each. The first table would comprise a comprehensive list of all available dealers. The second table was dedicated to all the relevant information with respect to transactions conducted by the contractors mapped under each dealer. We also added features like CSV and filters to alleviate the admin's workload further. We even designed a "Bulk Update" option for the admin to update multiple transaction statuses in bulk easily.
Considering the large amount of confidential and personal data involved, it became crucial to ensure optimal security. For this, we created separate admin roles where limited people would be able to access confidential information. In addition to working with highly secure encryptions, we even displayed certain extra-sensitive information to the admins in an encrypted format.
In addition to wonderfully incorporated watermarks, our team added numerous design components to ensure a pleasant user journey. We conducted thorough consultation and strategizing to deliver an exceptional user experience. We also made sure to run beta testing before launching the application.

Our team met all of the client's requirements and significantly surpassed their hopes in delivering a comprehensive and valuable loyalty rewards application. Some of the highlights of our collaboration are as follows—

An impeccable and speedy application with a myriad of features.
A user-friendly interface for an effortless user experience.
A solid, protected website that cannot be compromised in terms of data security.

As a result of our diligent collaboration, we value being able to build a reliable working relationship with this client. Pleased and satisfied with the end result delivered by our team, the client requested our additional services in maintaining the integrity of the application.

Ozell Testimonial

The client recognized the chaotic and haphazard nature of the painter's market with regard to the Indian paint industry. This made them want to build an online loyalty system on top of their offline coupon system that was already in place. In addition, they wanted to expand their business and include more workers through coupons and loyalty rewards. Keeping this in mind, they approached our team with the notion of developing an online application that would help them grow their database and expand their business. Our technical proficiency and professional experience enabled us to recognize their particular requirements and build a program to help the client connect with their painters and reward them with various offers to further advance their business.

9 months of core development, followed by on-demand feature enhancements

Ozell Testimonial 2

Businesses often encounter a few difficulties as they embark on their digital development journeys. Here are some issues that surfaced during our cooperation—

Developing a complete solution for scanning and generating coupon codes.
Expediting the building of a single button for both "Log In" and "Sign Up."
Using third-party API to get aadhaar information and conduct verification.
Ensuring that bonus points are handled automatically in frontend development and manually in backend development.
Dividing cities per production and sales levels to offer multiple scanning options which would help retain more contractors.
Renewing reward points every year without affecting previous transactional information.
Incorporating two types of payments–immediate payments and credit notes.
Building a mechanism for the release of credit notes for the dealers based on their respective cities.
Ensuring an optimum level of security considering the amount of confidential information involved.
Delivering a speedy and seamless user experience.

Heading

25% boost in contractor’s database

Outcome

Our online loyalty program helped the client expand their contractor's database by 25%.

Heading

10000 Points Redeemed

Outcome

The reward points program witnessed the redemption of a whopping 10000 points.

Heading

20% increase in dealer retention

Outcome

We were able to enhance dealer retention by 20%, owing to our constant and robust strategies.

API & Microservices

Content Development & Marketing

Digital Design & Branding

DXP Strategy & Consulting

Mobile App Development

Product Design Strategy

Product Scaling

Product-Market Fit

UI Design & Implementation

Amazon AWS

Browserstack

Drupal 8

Flutter

GIT

Postman

Construction & Manufacturing

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

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