Integrating workflows associated with multiple markets is a difficult task. It can be made easier by utilizing the expert assistance and skills of an external IT team, such as CG Infinity . Our retail energy client engaged us to help develop a business consumer application.
Impact
The problem we were looking to solve was due to the client operating in 17 different markets involving over 60 different utilities. Each market and utility carried their own regulatory implications and required certain nuances around what information needed to be on the enrollment website, how it needed to be organized, and more specific details. Over a period of time, our client had set up 17 different custom websites which became a hassle to maintain and update. It was difficult to roll out new products, rates, or promotions for each website requiring an army to support the gigantic footprint.
Solution
The CIO of the company, who sponsored the project, onboarded CG Infinity for a configuration engine that would make those websites easier to maintain. At the same time, all of the logic for each market would flow through the enrollment engine. To solve this challenge we created a layer to improve maintenance efforts and accelerate bringing new products, rates, and promotions to the market. That drove the impactful execution of this product. A retail energy business expert from our team along with a technical architect prepared a 20,000-foot level design to address their primary goal of decreasing time-to-market, while secondarily lowering their ‘cost-to-play’.
Result
How did we approach this? After completing the design review with our client and incorporating the feedback we received, we constructed a team to deploy it. Apart from the architect and retail energy business expert, we added five software engineers and two QA engineers to the team to build the enrollment engine, encompassing all 17 markets. It took us 14 weeks to complete development including end-to-end testing of the engine. The outcome was highly positive as we were able to roll out the system to all 17 markets. A process that previously took the sales and marketing teams close to 3 months to release a new product could now be achieved in less than a week with the new enrollment engine.