Case Study: System Integration Redesign
Learn how Fluent Consultants helped a franchisor increase the speed of their mission critical system by 1,286%, while dramatically improving the collection and accuracy of franchise performance data.
Client Snapshot:
The company provides collision repair through a network of more than 400 company owned and franchised facilities in the US and Canada.
Challenge:
The company struggled with collection and accuracy of data needed to measure its franchise performance and negotiate preferred partner status with P&C (auto) insurance companies.
The franchises, who are more comfortable straightening out twisted metal than entering data, were being asked to input data into two separate systems; both an industry leading cloud shop management system and a company provided insurance-centric system with extreme latency issues. As a result, franchises circumvented the process by manually providing service information directly to the insurance companies. This resulted in significant gaps in performance data. The company initially worked with an offshore IT development company to resolve these issues but severed the relationship after a pattern of failures.
Solution:
The company turned to the Fluent Consultants to build a single web interface for the two systems and to resolve the latency issues caused by the ineffectual integration between the company provided and shop management systems.
Fluent made the following key improvements to the system:
Salvaged as much of the “broken” system as possible, reducing overall costs and improving turnaround time for a successful project
Designed and constructed a single .Net web interface to capture data for both the company provided and shop management systems simultaneously
Rebuilt the integration link between the company provided system and the shop management system to share accurate up-to-date service data
Improved system response time by working with the shop management software product team to help them improve their API and better index their database
Created 100% backward compatibility with core business systems and processes with added data points and extensions to provide new business and performance metrics
Final Outcome:
The integration redesign increased system speed by 1,286%, reducing an average response time from the previous 2 minutes, with nearly a 50% timeout rate, to just 1 second.
This performance improvement and the introduction of a single web interface for data entry dramatically improved collection and accuracy of franchise performance data. This has also enabled the franchises to be more efficient which has fostered a better franchise/company relationship and created a stronger value proposition to recruit new franchisees.