Enhancing e-commerce platform – IT staff augmentation case study
A leading American manufacturer of high-end tools and equipment designs products and solutions that center on improving productivity in franchised dealerships and their supply chain. Their key goals are to increase sales, reduce structural costs,and improve the customer experience. Franchises are provided a complete set of information tools including electronic parts catalogs, diagnostic systems, financial and operational reporting services and warranty management solutions.
Challenge
When one of their largest customers requested help improving their e-commerce website, the project was assigned to one of their third-party offshore vendors. This low-cost vendor relied solely on emails and phone calls to organize its work and maintain the existing website. Updates and new features were consistently late and of poor code quality, requiring additional internal client resources to manage the project. These quality and performance challenges strained the overall customer relationship leading the manufacturer to determine an alternative solution.
Solution
Within two weeks of engagement, two of Surge’s senior software engineers proceeded to analyze, evaluate and work with the current team to determine recommendations for the current web platform. Utilizing JIRA for agile project management, the teams were able to get organized and determine an efficient action plan. Weekly sprint meetings allowed for better communication between the teams and ensured a timely execution of the tasks. Processes were improved, bugs were resolved and development of the e-commerce platform was put back on track.
Results
The offshore team of six developers was replaced by two senior experienced onshore developers (“Surgeons”) who:
- Reduced the bug resolution time to hours instead of weeks
- Achieved a failure rate of less than 1%
- Migrated the code base to a modern framework (C#/MVC/Entity Framework/AngularJS stack)
“We have practically re-written our website over again with two Surge developers in 5 months. The previous version took 7 off-shore developers the same amount of time; except this time it works properly!”- Technical Manager