Driving Revenue Growth Through Digital Innovation at Faber Publishing

Problems We Had To Solve

1. All business operations managed from an ageing software platform that had no connectivity to modern web technology
2. A need to provide easier access to their clients and distributors for digital assets - held in the legacy system
3. Had to maintain business operations and avoid disruption to ongoing users of the legacy system

The Plan

1. Run our North Star Workshop to identify how the planned new ecommerce site fit in with the wider business operations
2. Identify additional improvements that could be made as part of the project to enhance the experience of re-sellers and other strategic partners
3. Design, develop and deploy the new ecommerce site, alongside upgrading the process for distributing assets to re-sellers
4. Continue to enhance both the ecommerce site and wider operational tech including watermarking of assets for distribution and performance of the cloud infrastructure

The Challenges

1. Existing bespoke ERP system had no modern data connections available
2. Existing basic ecommerce site was a module of the ERP system
3. The ecommerce site needed replacing with a modern solution, without significant rework of the ERP system which was out of budget for the project

What We Did

1. Created a custom piece of middleware that could communicate with the feeds produced by the ERP system, and make these useable by a modern API
2. We moved the bare minimum of data between the two systems - only business critical information goes back into the ERP
3. By taking the data out of the ERP we were able to manipulate it more effectively, allowing functionality like advanced search to be implemented
4. Continually look for other opportunities to move services away from the ERP, replacing it one component at a time

Technologies Utilised

• .Net Core
• Angular 2+ front end
• AWS infrastructure
• AWS cloud formation templates
• Open Search

Results

• 3 x Revenue Growth From Direct Sales