The Client engaged in a number of digital transformation initiatives in the cloud, with a view to improving customer experience. Intelligent Pathways helped design and develop an online self-service portal, led the solution architecture for the integration layer of a new website with booking capabilities, provided strategic advice to optimise AWS costs, and helped the Client build maturity in their internal software delivery practice by embedding best practice design.
“What I’ve noticed from Intelligent Pathways number one is they brought practice, they brought process, and maturity in the development space, and knew how to help the rest of the team adopt or adapt to the right practices. The whole exercise has helped us build a very efficient machine that now delivers very predictably and at the lowest cost.“
~ Client Project Manager
The Client is a provider of air cargo services across Australia and internationally. Intelligent Pathways have worked with the Client over several years to foster a strong relationship, and solve various complex problems that have faced this organisation in their digital transformation.
The Client recognised that some of their key offerings required extra care and detailed information, and needed to convey a high level of trust to the customer. Because of this many customers preferred to call the call centre rather than use online tools for even simple queries. This was resulting in delayed response times, internal inefficiencies and a high cost to service. The Client wanted to improve customer experience, reduce the cost-to-service and introduce new ancillary products through online services.
Intelligent Pathways designed and developed an online self-service portal where customers can securely book and access information on their pet transport. The solution has a microservices architecture, was designed and built leveraging Behaviour Driven Development techniques and natively in the cloud (AWS technology). Once deployed, and with targeted change management, there was a solid reduction in call centre dependent pet transport bookings.
The existing customer website was built on ageing technology that made it very time consuming to update content. This meant the website was often out of date and was cumbersome for users to navigate. The success of the pet transport application positioned the Client to confidently move their entire website and booking system to the cloud with the primary driver of enabling self-service and improving user experience.
The website’s front end was built on Adobe Experience Manager and was integrated with several core systems to ensure the customer website is easy to navigate and has up-to-the-minute information available. Intelligent Pathways led the solution architecture for the integration layer with the guiding principles of high performance and efficiency for the end user. The new website is robust, easily updated, and flexible for the changing needs of the business’ online offerings, increasing customer confidence in a digital experience.
As a solution scales it is critical to actively manage the AWS platform to avoid inefficiencies. Intelligent Pathways took the initiative and identified some areas that would optimise the Client’s AWS costs. We implemented a range of improvements that resulted in a 50% reduction in the Client’s monthly expenditure including:
Intelligent Pathways also initiated an ongoing merge to serverless hosting for applicable use cases.
Along with the successful implementation of the pet transport application and new website, Intelligent Pathways has helped the Client build maturity in their internal software delivery practice by embedding best practice design and development techniques (such as Agile ‘Given – When – Then’ frameworks and Event Modeling) and fostering better collaboration between different groups of stakeholders. This has resulted in a more stable development practice that delivers right fit solutions on time and on budget.
Intelligent Pathways was engaged to set up the foundational cloud platform that would help accelerate the Client’s transition to a digital-first business. Our engagement began with the delivery of the application to facilitate online booking for pet transport. Not only was the application a success; the agile way of working was also proven as a delivery model that would suit their ongoing delivery needs. Intelligent Pathways were then further engaged to assist with strategy, architecture, design, and execution of various stages and products within the Client’s digital transformation.
The Client’s digital transformation has improved customer experience and dramatically increased the use of online services. As a result there has been an increase in revenue from ancillary services and a reduction in the cost to provide these services.
The cloud platform has also significantly reduced the time it takes to develop new features and offer new services to the market. Previously, large new features such as International Booking would have taken up to a year to deliver; a similar product now takes only four months. Similarly, medium-sized development items now only take approximately 1-1.5 months end to end.
