Order management system

Rackage, a medium sized and rapidly growing vertical-market server hosting company based in London, UK.

Situation

The client's business was expanding rapidly and fast outgrowing the systems they had in place to manage their accounts, orders and payments. The existing processes and tools were becoming increasingly inefficient and error prone. (Sound familiar?) With staff spending ever more time on administration they were unable to develop the business and maintain their customer relationships by offering the exceptional customer service for which they were renowned.

Following considerable effort researching off-the-shelf software packages, but unable to find any that met their requirements, they realised a custom solution would allow them to satisfy their existing needs and to introduce new marketing ideas to provide a significant competitive advantage.

Action

Purple Crane worked with the client to plan a custom software solution to be developed in several stages. We then specified an action plan and price agreement to suit the client's requirements and budget. Development adopted an iterative approach with close client involvement and frequent releases for client review.

The first stage involved the replacement of existing order handling systems with a multi-user order management and account monitoring application. This was closely followed by a complex charge configuration manager with the combined result currently being integrated with a new customer website.

Result

Successful delivery of the first two phases have restored control over the client's administrative processes - releasing staff for customer support activities - and added the ability to create innovative charging structures and special offers.

The continued relationship aims to integrate other existing systems leading to an automated business process that saves time and offers customers a seamless order-to-product service with on-line account management and customer service.

What the client says:

“It was important for Rackage to work with a development team that possessed a strong multi-disciplinary understanding of the core technical challenges within our business. Purple Crane showed an aptitude for assimilating and incorporating emerging technologies into a bleeding edge bespoke solution that met our complicated back-office needs reliably, while simultaneously securing and simplifying the process for our international customer base.”

Rackage Servers - Ben Hopkinson, CTO

Technology

Microsoft .NET 2.0/3.5, C#, MS Sql Server 2005, ASP.NET, Web Services, WCF, Ajax, NHibernate, Starteam.