Everlon Bronze is an Australian based company that produces custom-made bronze products, and was in need for an “Online Product Design Tool”. Their services cater towards delivering and giving customers the freedom to design their products, such as casting bronze plaques, commemorative products, bronze statues and memorial accessories.
Key Challenges
When Everlon Bronze continued to use their original (Windows) application for plaque customisation, they encountered a number of challenges. To move forward and grow the business, they have identified their key goals which were:
Cloud Based
To have a cloud-based platform where clients are able to login and customise the design of the plaque products in real-time and view the price breakdown of the costs whilst placing an order.
Happy Customers
An online product design tool, which improves customer experience through an intuitive and easy to use tool-set. It allows editing and creative changes previewed in real time.
Scalable Solution
To have a scalable and customisable platform that is easily accessible through a customers browser, where new features can be implemented without interruption.
Designing and Ordering a product as simple as 1, 2, 3
The Solution
We created an online product design tool to replace the Windows based client version of the software for placing plaque orders. The new web-based tool helps customers design their own memorial and commemorative plaques through their browser.
Benefits and features
Intuitive Interface
The new system empowers customers and provides them with superior user experience. Clients have plenty of choice and the freedom to create and design bronze plaques best suited for their requirements. It is designed to be used by non-technical users who can easily design the plaques with creative usage of font, colour, images and motifs that cater to their cultural, religious and military needs. Other features include a library of products as well as drag-and-drop editing.
Simplifying the customer service process
The web-based platform has standardised the process in creating immediate designs and can now show the price breakdown of the costs involved in the order. It also helps the clients to track the product and for staff to perform quality control as the product moves through the manufacturing process.
Improved Accuracy and Efficiency
The previous system required customers to send pictures of their desired product by email, which meant that images were often not to scale and were unclear for foundry staff to work on. This resulted in errors and rework. The new wizard has provided benefits to the foundry staff who have less clarifications and less instances of human error and rework.
Technology
The latest technologies and tools at the time have been used to develop the Online Product Design Tool. These can be broken down into:
Interface Layer
Built with a responsive web design, the interface layer is written in HTML 5 and CSS 3.
Business Rules Layer
The framework used in the business rules layer is Microsoft .NET 4.5
Data Layer
Microsoft SQL Server was used in the database layer for the online plaque wizard system.
