In March of 2005 Reliant was asked to consult on a project that was supposed to be an incremental improvement to the e-commerce site www.GetDocsNow.com. The site had grown organically from a small beginning concept over the period of 3 years. As the owners had found each new product and market that they could expand to, their developers had added that as a tacked on piece to the original site. Since the additions where ad-hoc creations without any master plan, the site had gotten less and less manageable as time went on.
For example, the different sections did not share financial data or even record it in a way where sales data from each module could be tied to the date from the other modules. As a result, the site’s staff spent 3 days each month calculating their accounts receivable and payable by hand. An investigation of the site revealed other serious systemic problems. The site required users to login in multiple times to access all sections and it wasn’t at all clear which modules contained each product. It addition to be very confusing, the different pieces hadn’t really been tested working together under load and were prone to errors that forced the customer to start the transaction again. At that time, the support department was handling between 40 and 80 support calls a day from customers who couldn’t find their product or who had experienced an error on the site.
After a full evaluation, Reliant recommended to GDN that it would be most cost effective to scrap the current site and rewrite it from scratch. The new site could include all the products and services that GDN had grown to include in a unified and cohesive way and Reliant could produce a design that would be able to properly grow with the business. GDN’s owners agreed with one caveat, they had already paid a graphic artist for an update to the look and they wanted the new site to use that imagery and layout. Reliant went on contract and began gathering requirements near the end of April. GDN’s new site went live at midnight on August 12, 2005.
The number of support calls immediately dropped from 40-80 to 10-20. As users became accustomed to the new site layout and functionality the support calls dropped further to 4-8 a day. GDN has now been live, hosted on Reliant’s servers, for more than a year with no unplanned outages. They have processed more than 20,000 transactions and generating their accounts payable and receivable now takes them 5 minutes once a month. Additionally, they have seamlessly integrated two new products into their business model without any major investment of programmer time.