Upbeat, Inc., a medium-sized catalog company based in St. Louis, Missouri, hired Business Innovation to help Upbeat achieve a series of business objectives over the following three years, including reducing costs and increasing revenues by expanding current relationships and adding new customers. Upbeat recognized that to achieve these goals, their existing IT infrastructure needed major improvements. Business Innovation conducted a Rapid Collaboration Workshop™ and applied our four-step project methodology to help Upbeat achieve their business and technology goals quickly.
Rapid Collaboration Workshop™
Business Innovation conducted a three-day Rapid Collaboration Workshop™ on site in Upbeat's offices in St. Louis, Missouri. Upbeat's Core Management Team (CMT), including the CEO and business leads from MIS, Finance, Customer Service, Human Resources, and Marketing came together with Business Innovation's team leads from Technology, User Experience, and Project Management. The Business Innovation team led Upbeat's CMT through a series of exercises outlining Upbeat's business objectives and the state of their IT infrastructure. Output included a detailed list of Upbeat's business requirements by business unit and a recommended future state infrastructure diagram.
Business Innovation learned that Upbeat had three major goals:
1. Consolidate sales data across three corporate entities
2. Know their customers better: who they are, what they buy, etc.
3. Reduce customer service interaction with orders from the website
The Workshop revealed that Upbeat, Inc. had a 20-year-old back-end system that ran most of their business (accounts payable, accounts receivable, and inventory management), using outdated technologies. Business Innovation also learned that Upbeat's existing systems could not analyze their customer data or market segments. The software could not create and track marketing campaigns. And the infrastructure could not support straight-through processing of orders from external channels (e.g., web) to their legacy backend system. Customer service representatives had to enter each web order by hand into the legacy system. In short, Upbeat's existing system could not support their short- or long-term business goals.
Business Innovation's Recommendation
Upbeat needed an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) tool to connect the three corporate entities with each other, the legacy system, and the website. Upbeat also needed the abilities to store, analyze, and report their customer, sales, and product data once the EAI tool got the disparate systems talking. And Upbeat needed a more robust website, offering more functionality, an improved user experience, and easier maintenance.
Package Selection
Business Innovation worked with Upbeat, Inc. to outline all business, user, and technical requirements for a new suite of systems to meet Upbeat's business and technological goals. Keeping in mind Upbeat's timeline and budget, Business Innovation conducted package selection research which resulted in the acquisition of a new suite of Microsoft technologies including BizTalk Server 2004, Commerce Server 2002, and SQL Server 2000 with Analysis Services. This recommendation was based largely on the feeling that Upbeat's MIS team could learn to maintain a Microsoft solution without reliance on outside contractors (a previous problem for Upbeat). And the Microsoft solution could be developed quickly and cost-effectively- with no fears of cross-vendor interoperability issues.
Define and Design
With the new Microsoft suite purchased, Business Innovation began a formal Business and Technical Design phase, documenting the EAI software development, changes to the legacy system, and the structure of the new data warehouse and reporting capabilities. Business Innovation's user experience team spent this time sketching process flows, user scenarios, navigation structures, and branding and content strategies for the new website.
During frequent conference calls and in-person review sessions, Business Innovation worked closely with the Upbeat team to nail down the scope and requirements of this three-pronged initiative and design each system to meet Upbeat's strict business needs and restrictions. All Design documentation was handed over to Upbeat and approved for Development.
Develop and Deploy
Business Innovation designed an enterprise architecture and roadmap that allows Upbeat to meet critical business objectives in the short-term and migrate away from an aging and brittle system in the long run. At the core of the architecture is BizTalk, Microsoft's Enterprise Application Integration solution. It serves as an integration bus that enables population of a data warehouse and live integration with the website. Over time, other functionality can be migrated out of the back-end system and at the same time strategic initiatives can be developed without having to re-engineer 20-year old code. Upbeat plans to evaluate content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software to improve their overall business processes in the near future- something they could not have realistically considered without the BizTalk implementation.
Future-state Logical Architecture
Business Innovation developed Release 1 of the new e-commerce website using Microsoft Commerce Server 2002 and .NET. The new website gave Upbeat an infrastructure that could easily communicate with the legacy applications, passing orders through to the backend without CSR intervention and sending messages regarding sales and products to the appropriate systems and departments for tracking and reporting purposes.
The project also designed and deployed a data warehouse solution using SQL Server 2000 with Analysis Services. Previously, it took Upbeat's associates several days to develop new views of their data using legacy flat-file formats. Business Innovation helped define the data and data views that will be critical for Upbeat to understand how best to focus their business over the next 36 months. The data is extracted automatically from the legacy system into a staging and loading environment which is used to cleanse and translate the data. Business Innovation also developed cubes and dimensions using SQL Server Analysis Services, providing Upbeat business users with the flexibility to analyze and view their data in ways they couldn't before.
The Result
The ultimate goals of the combined Upbeat and Business Innovation team were to position Upbeat for success in both the short (6-12 months) and long term (1-3+ years). Upbeat needed better access to their data to develop targeted marketing strategies and other strategic business initiatives. Without those targeted campaigns, Upbeat could not reach their existing customers or grow their customer base- both of which were needed to increase revenue.
The software solution implemented by Business Innovation is projected to increase Upbeat's online sales by over 38% in the first year. The new ecommerce site reduces Upbeat's dependency on their legacy system and reduces the associated maintenance cost of private contractors. Reduced dependency on this system will also reduce the hidden costs associated with inaccurate data and reporting. Upbeat's business users can now generate their own reports from clean and accurate data resulting in increased sales opportunities, viewing complete customer records across multiple corporate entities and the ecommerce site, analyzing customer trends and buying habits, segmenting customers based on trends, and targeting customers for special marketing campaigns based on their profiles. Integrated systems and clean data will also give Upbeat, Inc. opportunities to offer more and different products, introduce new vendors, and track the effectiveness of new products and vendors.
Sherry Lease from Product Marketing uses the new data warehouse for product placement in the catalog. Previously she had trouble knowing where to position products or how much space each should be allowed in the catalog- a common problem for catalog designers. Sherry recently said this about Upbeat's new data warehouse, "You have just made it so much easier for me to lay these pages out in the correct way. In other words, I can focus on what is actually selling."
In addition to these real benefits, the solution will position the company for success as the business grows and changes. The IT systems will be flexible and adaptable enough to handle millions of customers online, tens of thousands of new products, and dozens of new employees.
"The work that Business Innovation is doing will result in us knowing our customer base better. Customers by sic codes, industry sectors, buying patterns by time of year, geographical analysis; offers to our old and new customers will have a higher conversion rate." Bill Gilbert, Upbeat, Inc. CEO.