UpSwell was growing fast and adding large, national accounts. To keep up with that demand they needed an updated production management system and to improve the speed at which they could process large orders.
We redesigned and modernized their production management system and improved the performance of their custom software jobs to allow them to serve larger accounts and their growing customer base.
UpSwell is a marketing agency that specializes in the automotive and fitness industries. They combine print and digital advertising to help their customers grow their business.
With a large existing legacy application, we took a nuanced approach to redesigning and modernizing UpSwell's production management system. By avoiding a complete re-write we were still able to make big changes while providing business continuity. By updating the platform we laid the groundwork to iteratively refactor the system over time.
We also focused on performance and re-wrote several critical production jobs to process millions of records efficiently.
Building on a long term relationship with UpSwell, we sat down with their team to understand their goals, key stakeholders, and identify what the wins were for this project. We determined that they wanted a clean, modern interface while also leveraging the platform they already had in place. We laid out a roadmap to redesign their production management system and scoped out several key initiatives to improve the performance of back-end processes and improve the efficiency of their team.
While improving the speed of UpSwell's production process was part of the equation, it was just as important to make it easy and intuitive for their sales reps to place and manage orders.
We created user flows to identify the optimal way to allows sales reps to place orders for their largest customers and created a bulk upload process that allowed them to schedule mailings for hundreds of customers in a matter of minutes. Instead of having to make hundreds of different clicks, sales reps could upload a spreadsheet and walk through an import wizard to place their orders.
We took the existing legacy production management system written in ASP.NET Web Forms and added ASP.NET MVC for a more modern web application framework. We utilized shared controls and styles to optimize code re-use. We also converted the application from using CSS to use LESS and updated the bundling and minification to improve page load performance.
We then built bulk-import tools to allow UpSwell sales team to efficiently load and schedule mailings for hundreds of locations at a time.
Finally, we optimized slow running jobs by writing SQL stored procedures and reduced the time it took process over 1 million records from over 6 hours to under 20 minutes.
