DMI (Digital Management, Inc.)

BACKGROUND

The client is an innovative media company that helps people engage with the news to view a story's impact, varying perspectives, and connections worldwide. The reviewer is the founder and CEO of that company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

The client approached Golden Gekko with a patented technology that would change the way people view and follow news stories. They needed a developer to build a custom iPad application to support this technology. They found Golden Gekko through some online reviews, and were initially concerned that the company's location in Barcelona would be challenging to deal with, given the distance and time zone difference. However, the client was pleasantly surprised by how easy they were to work with, and they continue to have a very positive ongoing relationship.

SOLUTION

Golden Gekko created a custom application in a span of nine months, completed in summer of 2013. The client's design team collaborated with the designers and developers at Golden Gekko to create the app. The cost of the project remains confidential at the client's request.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

The app was one of five nominated for the Best Mobile Publishing Product or Service category in the Global Mobile Awards 2014. While the client wishes to keep any quantitative success metrics confidential, he raves about how easy Golden Gekko was to work with and how impressed he was with their responsiveness and expertise.

In terms of areas of improvement, the client notes that communication is always something that both parties can improve upon. But, in all honestly, he believes Golden Gekko's only challenge going forward will be to maintain the exceedingly high level of quality as they grow in scale.

BACKGROUND

In 1870, Thomas and Ellen Warburton opened their first grocery shop and, in 1876, Ellen baked the first loaf of bread that would be the beginnings of Warburtons family bakers. Approximately 140 years later, the company now employs around 4,500 employees, and it is the most recognizable bread brand in the United Kingdom. 

In the past decade, the company has doubled in size, and spent more than £400 million on building, refurbishing, and upgrading their bakeries and general infrastructure.

Warburtons places great importance on the quality of their bread, hiring the most highly skilled bakers and cares about the welfare of their customers. As a company, they work under their core values of family, quality, care, responsibility, and ambition. Warburtons consider ambition as fundamental to their future success, and continual innovation underpins their entire business model. Warburtons is always trying to grow and expand, putting in increased amounts of energy and effort into marketing, sales, operations, and technology.

My role is an IT [information technology] project manager responsible for delivery of the Red Insight Solution for the Warburtons retail development team.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

A change in operational structure prompted reviews of service operations within the Warburtons retail development team. It was identified that territory managers were spending one day per week in an office performing costly administrative tasks that kept them away from working with our customers. Modern technologies were not being embraced, and a smarter way of working would be required to benefit not only the team’s daily activity, but also allow them to engage with other departments within Warburtons and allow further smarter ways of working.

It was clear that a change was required to improve the situation. Quickly, stakeholders were assembled by the project manager, focusing on current processes, and the design of the future solution. Ensuring close integration across IT and business functions from the project’s outset.

SOLUTION

In answer to the challenges, we developed a tablet application in close collaboration with Golden Gekko, our mobile app solution provider. The app, called Red Insight, has almost completely eliminated all paper data entry for the retail development team. The app mobilized the capture of in-store product data, and it equipped the team with real-time store card details. The app also gave employees access to marketing and promotional material anywhere, at any time, and to view an interactive catalog of products. When members of the retail development team input data into the application, it automatically updates Warburtons corporate backend systems, providing great time savings and increased levels of efficiency.

Red Insight allows the employees to view their scheduled visits by day, week, or month. They can see the location of stores on an interactive map, which also displays others in the surrounding area. Retail development team members are able to create and edit store visits on the go, and create and edit tasks.

The application allows access to sales support material, so employees can call on it at a moment’s notice, and always have the information to hand. Red Insight gives users the ability to select and view a store’s product range, view images and details of the products and complete an inventory audit with ease. All of these functions automatically update the Warburtons backend systems.

After the development of Red Insight was complete, user manuals were created and through a mixture of classroom and onsite training, managers were taught how to navigate the application, in a bid to make them confident users, who could encourage their teams to do the same. A selected group of “Stars” were also instructed in using Red Insight, who would be the leaders for other employees in the future, and hopefully be seen as a trusted resource should anyone have any problems or questions to do with the application. After initial training, Warburtons had a soft launch in a trial region, and gradually rolled the project out to all areas over the following months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Red Insight delivered a significant change in the way the retail development team interacted with the Warburtons customer base. Significantly improving the excellence in service delivery whilst on customer sites, but also providing key communication links across the supply chain network and quality functions.

The project defined key metrics it will be measured by were by early in the project as this needed to be at the core of any solution design. Measures were introduced to monitor: the reduction of administration time of the territory managers. time spent on Warburtons premises against time in store, increase in store visits against travel time, uplift in target KPIs [key performance indicators], sales increase, and greater share in store.

The delivered technology allowed the team to become effective mobile workers, allowing them to keep in touch with all corporate communications. But, the key was to ensure the engagement with the customers was smarter and more efficient, maximizing data capture and sharing while in store. Without the introduction of the technology, the significant benefits realized will not be seen.

The delivered solution was embraced by the retail development team, but equally as important, engagement within the customer community was high and was well received across all business channels.

At the heart of the project was a focus on customer needs and helping develop theirs and Warburtons businesses, improving the quality of service while in store and enabling further improvements to other departments in Warburtons by maximizing the effect of customer interactions.

The solution deployed lays the foundation for future technology enhancements, which are already in the pipeline, but also sets up a foundation for channels to market for new products and initiatives core to the success at Warburtons.

BACKGROUND

OVIVO is a mobile virtual network operator in the United Kingdom that provides a B2C [business-to-consumer] SIM-only service to customers. The primary form of monetization of the service is through advertising and m-commerce, leverage what OVIVO knows about its customers to deliver products and services that are targeted and of relevance.

My role is CEO of the company and I am the original founder who set up the business in September of 2011.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

The challenge for OVIVO was to develop a user-friendly application supported across a range of smartphones, tablets and desktop browsers, that allowed a customer to manage their account, view usage, and top up when outside of their allowance. In addition, the application would be used as an additional advertising delivery channel for customers.

There was an additional opportunity, which was to deliver a robust offers service, encompassing a range of products and services from OVIVO's partners that would be presented as offers with rewards for purchase through the application itself or through its affiliates.  

Aside from using a self-care application to reduce cost, stimulate top ups and drive advertising revenues, the offers aspect of the service underpins a significant percentage of OVIVO's revenues through 2016.

SOLUTION

We worked with Golden Gekko to leverage the self-care and offers products, and designed a solution, which involved the use of their platform integrated into OVIVO's billing API [application programming interface], combined with a rich HTML5 front end application for the customer. The application presented a consolidated account view and range of products and services presented as offers. During a six-month period, functionality was introduced in an agile fashion allowing OVIVO to measure customer feedback and fine tune the proposition, providing feedback directly into Golden Gekko's sprint cycles.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

The feedback and results were excellent. It should be noted that Golden Gekko is a trusted strategic partner of OVIVO and will underpin our development plans and strategy in the space of self-care and offers moving forward. Golden Gekko is an outstanding organization with highly skilled, passionate and dedicated people, who clearly understand the market and the importance of customer centric applications and services.

BACKGROUND

Can you provide some background information about your company?

We are an electronic retailer for content such as shows, tours and special events.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your main goal going into the project with Golden Gekko?

We were looking to develop a better delivery method, so we decided to create a native phone app. The future of our business for our particular type of products is moving toward mobile rapidly. We were looking for a better mousetrap, a better way to deliver our product to the customer. 

SOLUTION

How did you originally discover and choose Golden Gekko to work with?

We used Google searches to find the top app developers. We reached out to three or four different groups, and decided to work with Gekko.

What was it about Golden Gekko that made them stand out?

Initially, it was just response time and something that would be harder to define. My first contact was with Jon Morris, their business development person. He responded to me right away, as I had some follow-up questions within the first few days. He always responded to me quicker than everybody else. I can’t really define it, but I kind of hit it off with Jon. Our whole experience with them since, has been spectacular. Just to answer the question simply, it would be response time and the professionalism of the people I spoke with initially.

What parts of the project has Golden Gekko been involved with?

What we’re trying to build is an app that can provide people with location-based offers in a particular city. They can add any particular location, and search for offers within a certain distance from them. That is the main filter but there are others. There is a point- of-sale system and the ticketing system.

Ticketing is the back-end system where we manage the inventory of the tickets and what goes in and out. With respect to the point-of-sale system, we have some retail booths throughout the city where people can buy directly from us. Therefore, the ticketing system will also have to handle the point-of-sale side, our app and the location-based component.  Those are really the three big components of it. We’re still not done with it. We’ve been in the sculpting and building phase since December. It’s a fairly large project.

Was Golden Gekko involved in everything from the initial system design, graphic design, to backend development?

Yes, they came out initially and met with us. They sent people from New York and Barcelona and went through the sculpting phase. In some ways, they really helped us to better define our business model as we went through the process with them. So from that point forward, they’ve been part of everything. We consider them a partner as opposed to a vendor.

What platforms will the app be available for?

They will be available in different rollouts. It will be available on iPhone and Google devices, with Windows and BlackBerry RAM devices to follow very shortly thereafter. Tablets will be the final rollout once we’ve got all the phone versions out.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

How satisfied are you so far with the work Golden Gekko has delivered?

I’ll give them a 10 on everything. I’m not normally not easy to please. I hate to tell them that too often, but I’ve been impressed with them. If I could find their HR manager to hire my people, I would do it in a second. I can’t say enough good about them.

What is unique about Golden Gekko compared to other consultants or developers that you’ve worked with?

The thing that’s really stuck with us has been their approach to this. It has always been what’s best for our business model; what’s best for our company. It seems that price has never been a factor for anything they suggested. It’s always been about how to develop the best product for us, and then they would bill us accordingly for that. The scope, size, and operation never felt like it was dictated by price for them. Golden Gekko's approach was always dictated by what was best for us. That is absolutely what stood out to me.

Looking back, is there anything that you would do differently or think that they can improve upon?

Things might change after we launch. Right now, I have no improvements to suggest. I’m 100 percent satisfied with what they’ve done to this point.