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Since starting in 1994 with a team of five, The Unlimited has strived to “make a difference” to its clients. Now the direct marketing and financial services company has over 600 000 customers, and Deloitte has awarded the business its “Best Company to Work For” three years in a row.
IT was not truly enabling business outside of mission critical work, and software development was just taking too long. After selecting Warewolf, IT and business were able to collaborate better, get work done significantly faster and be more agile. Here’s what they accomplished:
373%
Faster Software
Development
Life Cycle
4x
Faster
development
time
$10k
Additional
monthly
revenue
“There are hundreds of small projects that add huge value but are not worth IT doing, or just take too long to implement using traditional software development. Because of Warewolf, we are able to get many little wins that shift the business in a very powerful way.”
Christopher Mulder
Collections Specialist at The Unlimited
Despite its many successes, The Unlimited was losing revenue due to an inefficient payment collections process. The company wanted to figure out which monthly payment days would best suit clients with multiple subscription products. Ideally, the Collections Department would align the payment date to the most successful day. But accomplishing this task manually was a tedious and time-consuming process.
Automating the relatively small job would make The Unlimited run more efficiently and increase profits, so it seemed like a logical solution. But Management hesitated to act. Mission critical projects had to take priority. With limited IT resources, many projects that could have added value had to take a back seat.
Management had other legitimate concerns. Typically, an SDLC involves a lengthy back and forth explanation process between IT and a business analyst. Documenting the details can be painfully slow. But as things stood, to fulfill the collection process manually took over six hours every month – hardly an efficiency. The Unlimited needed an agile solution.
After researching their options, The Unlimited selected Warewolf as a tool to address their inefficiencies and enable IT to work with more agility. Synerics (The Unlimited’s outsourced IT partner) and the business stakeholder responsible for optimizing subscription collections sat together to collaborate on the solution.
Group members voiced their enthusiasm. With Warewolf Studio’s simple drag and drop interface, there would be no need to outline requirements using lengthy documents prior to translating concepts into code. Warewolf would enable IT and Business to directly collaborate and co-create, while putting business logic front and center at each step of the process.
This new agile process provided The Unlimited with the tools they needed to succeed. Compared with traditional software development, using Warewolf was lightning fast. Business could now easily visualize technical concepts and explain the adjustments they needed the IT team to make in real time.
Professional forecasters estimate that this simple project would have taken nine days in total to complete, with four days devoted to development alone ¹. Using Warewolf, IT handed over the software solution in under three days for the business department to implement. Using Warewolf, they were able to deliver the entire solution to business in under 3 days, with 8 hours taken for the development ² - a 4x faster development time.
The Unlimited achieved a 373% savings in overall project delivery time. Warewolf Studio requires no new infrastructure or complicated maintenance, which also saved the company money. In fact, automating the small process of aligning collection dates has enabled the business to enjoy a revenue increase of up to $10 000 every month. The Unlimited is now exploring ways to use Warewolf for all kinds of business processes and looks forward to realizing even greater savings in years to come.
| Step in SDLC | Traditional Development | Warewolf Development |
|---|---|---|
| Requirements gathering and analysis | 8 hours | 2 hours |
| Design | 16 hours | 4 hours |
| Implementation or coding | 32 hours | 8 hours |
| Testing | 12 hours | 4 hours |
| Deployment | 1 hour | 0.5 hour |
| Total | 69 hours or 8.6 days | 18.5 hours or 2.3 days |
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