- Overview
- By Industry
- Banking
- Business and Professional Markets
- Capital Markets
- Commercial Real Estate
- Federal/Public Sector
- Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
- Independent Software Vendors
- Insurance
- Lending
- Manufacturing
- Media/Entertainment
- Transportation/Distribution/Logistics
- Utilities/Telco
- By Area of Expertise
- Business Intelligence
- Custom .NET Application Development
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Workflow and Collaboration
Case Studies
Worldwide Partner Sales and Marketing Tool Drives Increased Revenue
Project at a Glance |
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RDA designed a highly graphical Web interface solution that is used by partners of a global software and technology developer. The tool combines our client's marketing content with predefined templates to seamlessly generate print-ready marketing collateral in multiple languages and currencies. This results in consistent messaging, pricing and branding, ultimately driving increased business and revenue for our client. |
About Our Client
As a global leader in software and network system development, our client partners with thousands of companies to sell product licenses. In fact, our client generates over 96% of its revenue through its partner channel.
Background
Prior to this project, many partners did not actively market our client's products due to budget constraints, a lack of in-house expertise, or time limitations. Initially, our client worked with a large, well known consulting firm to create a tool that would enhance the marketing capabilities of its partners. After several months and a good deal of effort and expense without much progress, they contacted RDA to assume responsibility for the project. Due to the previous false start, our team had only six months to build a complex, high value Web application from scratch under a fixed-price, fixed deadline agreement.
Solution Detail
The RDA team created a tool that combines our client's marketing content with predefined templates for business letters, postcards, emails, flyers and telemarketing scripts. Partners choose the message they want to communicate and the template that they prefer and the tool creates a marketing piece that they can customize with their logo and tailored messaging.
Project Highlights
Leveraging RDA's object-oriented Domain Model Framework (DMF) enabled the team to build the system rapidly by focusing on the development of the business layer on top of a tested, pre-coded application framework. Within the first few weeks of the project, we had a fully functioning architectural prototype of the application. We used the archetype to refine the system requirements and design and evolved the archetype into the finished system with minimal code waste. The resulting design is highly maintainable and extensible, supporting multiple applications using a single business layer and data layer.
Complementing the skills of our team and the benefits of DMF was IT FlightPlan, a visual and communicative project management process developed by RDA over many years of project success. IT FlightPlan provides for weekly iterations and enables the RDA team to manage the project to the plan established by our client. It was perfectly suited to this project scenario.
Special Features of the Solution
- Multiple Language Support - The tool is used worldwide with the first deployment in the European market. The tool needed to be designed to support multiple languages and currencies.
- Passport Integration - Our tool needed to work with a single sign-on system created for our client's partners.
- Web Service Interfaces - There were several Web service interfaces that the tool needed to use. The tool needed to interface with our client's partner information system as well as the marketing service vendor.
- Highly Graphical User Interface - The tool generates print-ready marketing materials in PDF format. Preview of these materials is seamless within the Web application, resulting in a very usable and graphical user interface.
Benefits
The solution RDA delivered benefits our client by creating a solution that allows for tracking of marketing activities to measure return on their investment along with increased marketing of their products through their partners, which will drive business and increase revenue.
Benefits to the partners include reduced time and cost for running marketing campaigns. Partners can print and distribute their marketing material through a client-approved vendor by uploading a customer list. Pooling partner marketing efforts through a single vendor enabled our client to negotiate a price that individual partners could not have received on their own. In addition to the economy of scale savings, our client is subsidizing certain campaigns to further encourage partner participation and drive marketing efforts.
Challenges
The RDA team had a tight deadline, fixed budget, high expectations after a previous false start, and a limited knowledge of the operations of our client's partner group. Our team stepped up to the challenges, quickly learned the business and delivered results. Ultimately, the project was completed on time and 20% under budget with all development completed offsite, far exceeding the expectations of the client!
Technically Speaking
The system was built using ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server. Web services were used for system to system communications.
