The Challenge

Serta Simmons Bedding, LLC is the world’s leading producer of mattresses and sleep experiences. 

We were approached to build a portal for dealers and sales reps across Canada where the users would be able to download digital marketing assets and order physical assets to have shipped directly to their stores.

To give a sense on the scope, below is a list of high level requirements our team was provided:

• Dealer users would need to be able to download digital assets.
• Sales reps needed the ability to order physical assets through the portal and have it approved by Admin users and then sent to fullfillment users so that they can ship the order to the sales rep.
• Sales reps would need to be able to get notified by email about the status of their orders when it gets approved and fulfilled. 
• Admin users would need the ability to add physical and digital assets, add/disable sales reps, dealers, and fullfillment users, as well as approve or reject orders, among other things. 
• Admin users would need to be tied to specific brands since there were different assets for different brands (Serta, Simmons, Beautyrest, Tuft & Needle)
• The portal needed to be designed mobile first and focus on a user-friendly structure with navigation for dealers and reps to easily access the items they need. 
• We needed to ensure the portal was permission/role based since different roles were not allowed to do what other roles could.
• We needed to assist in migrating users from their existing portal to our new one.
• The client needed the portal to be built, tested, and go live within 4 months due to a product launch; despite us originally estimating 6 months of development.
  ‍

‍

The Solution

Our team conducted a thorough assessment of the existing portal and had multiple working sessions with our client to get an understanding of their overall requirements and flow. Through those discussions, we discovered that the target audience was of specific age group and that our user experience needed to be tailored to ensure maximum ease of use. 

We came up with a series of UX recommendations to improve usability and maintainability. This included mapping out the user flow based on roles and access control, as well as creating high-fidelity prototypes.

Once we finalized the designs, our frontend and backend development team got together to plan out a full stack Vue.js and Laravel web application. The app featured a dynamic layout which was tailored to the user and their role. Admins would have an easy time maintaining assets, managing users, and adjust settings. At the same time, dealers and sales reps would be able to favourite and download assets, check stock on physical assets, and review claims co-op claims (another feature of the portal).

In addition to improving the user experience, we had to carefully architect our tech stack to allow for secure authentication and data management using a high performance server and managed database, all of which was setup and configured by our team on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

Our team worked in sprints and we planned to have the entire application built within 4 months even though we originally estimated 6 months of development effort. This was no simple task, however, since our team planned the entire project at the beginning, and pulled in additional resources where needed, we were able to meet the client’s deadline.

Once development was complete, our internal QA team completed a rigorous testing plan on the portal which included, but not limited to functional QA testing, WCAG accessibility audit, responsive testing (for mobile users), security, and performance/speed testing. After our team was confident all our internal QA passed, the project was off to the staging environment for client review and UAT, where only minor feedback was received since our team did such an excellent job with internal QA.
‍

‍

The Results

• Facilitated the management of 250+ dealers and 65+ sales reps across Canada
• Featured over 100+ marketing assets and 2000+ downloads
• 3X improvement in time to delivery, compared to the previous platform 
• Realtime maintenance of assets, orders, and claims
• We deployed the portal in 2018 and it has been running smoothly since. There has never been downtime or any bugs reported since launch!
  ‍

Technologies

• Vue.js Frontend
• Laravel Backend
• HTML5, CSS3, JS
• PHP
• AWS Cloud Hosting Infastructure setup and maintenance (RDS, S3 Buckets, EC2 Containers, Route 53, among others were all used in the setup and implementation)
  ‍

Our Services

• UX
• Design
• Web Development
• Frontend Development
• Backend Development
• Server & Database Maintenance
• UAT