Business Transformation Through Software Engineering

Background

John Warrillow, one of the most influential US business-to-business marketers according to BtoB Magazine and the author of the bestselling books "Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You" and "The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry", contacted AltexSoft to build his innovative cloud-based business assessment and enhancement tool.

Providing business development services and helping improve businesses, John and his team used a unique methodology and a specific web-based tool. The previous version of the product, created by AltexSoft, basically consisted of dynamic web forms and underlying algorithms, used to analyze completed surveys, calculate the company's “sellability index”, and generate reports and recommendations based on the collected data.

As this project, “the Sellability Score”, brought significant value to his company, John wanted to bring more of his business logic online, and reach a much wider audience without having to bear the costs associated with an offline presence in various locations.

Challenges

Value Builder had to cover the next steps, following the Sellability Score assessment, and provide a guided business enhancement tool that both customers and agents could use. It had to incorporate 12 monthly modules with practical tasks and methodological materials, aimed at improving different aspects of the business. The step-by-step enhancement process required systematic interactions with certified advisors as well as the ability to keep records of the results.

In this regard, the AltexSoft team needed to cope with the following challenges:

Map out the business logic

Conduct an exhaustive business analysis

Move most of the client’s business processes online

Value Delivered

To help John bring his vision to life, we needed to provide not only competent engineering services but also delve into the logic of the business and company processes. As a result of our team’s efforts, a new tool, “the Value Builder system”, has completely transformed the client’s business. Its benefits include:

Improved Business Logic and Thought-Out Development Process

It took three steps to create the product: Planning and prototyping, UI design and engineering. The team mapped out the product structure and created detailed prototypes for every page, wrapped them up in custom UI and implemented it all using engineering best practices. Thanks to the outstanding planning and careful preparations, the engineering process was more predictive and fast, which resulted in significant savings on time and cost for the client.

Thorough Business Strategy Implementation

A complete business analysis, conducted by AltexSoft, fleshed out the end product. In order to develop an outstanding solution, our team dug deep into the product itself: we even analyzed the formulas underlying the calculations in the system itself. This helped us provide valuable advice and improve the existing modules’ structure.

Complete Digitization of Business Processes

The process of improving the company’s value, which initially used offline materials and systematic manual follow-ups, has been completely moved to the cloud as part of the cooperation. Thus, both business owner and his advisor can now access the methodological assets at any time and efficiently interact online.

Approach and Technical Info

The product was built by the AltexSoft team using PHP and the latest version of the Symfony HTTP framework and additional tools like AngularJS (JavaScript), HTML, CSS, AJAX, jQuery, and MySQL. Continuous integration has been implemented using Jenkins.

The basic version of the project was delivered within 4 months by the team consisting of 4 members. Additional resources have been involved part-time throughout the process.

Services provided within the project framework: Technology Consulting.

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