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The Polish operation of The Unlimited was started in 2015, as The Unlimited South Africa expanded globally, bringing new opportunities to Poland. The company initially started off with a small base of people selling insurance and lifestyle products from Warsaw.
This startup company was faced with the challenge of needing to fix their back end and operational processes to enable the sales operation of the business to move forward. They also needed to maintain their agility and ability to adapt to change as they grew. Using Warewolf, they were able to meet their business goals in a fraction of the time and without distraction from the front end of the business.
160%
faster system delivery
40%
time saving
00
real agility advantage
"Before using Warewolf, the system was horrendously complicated. After automating and developing it in Warewolf we were given line of site of so much we didn’t have before. Consequently, it saved a huge amount of time and allowed us to have our finger on the pulse through the volatile early days of this startup"
Sandy Pistorius
Head of International Operations,
The Unlimited Group
For any startup in a rapid growth phase, scaling and automating systems is incredibly challenging. The Unlimited Poland found that they had inherited an incredibly complex and tedious process which handled everything from capturing the sale to the final delivery of the welcome pack to the customer. Included in the process there were multiple points of potential failure and the company was blind to the step in the process and response of the customer. This posed a massive threat to how they could successfully complete and monitor the sale and the lifecycle of the customer. Additionally, their ability to grow and continue being agile was hindered by the complexity and size of their mostly manual systems.
The current process was being managed manually as well as with Windows Services and stored procedures. When mapped out, the entire process workflow took up 13 pages in 8 point font. It was incredibly complex, and tended to fall over easily. Doing everything in SQL was very process heavy. Additionally there were many points open to failure because of the manual nature of the process.
The solution needed to be automated, but also changed regularly given the early phase of the company’s life. A traditionally developed solution did not seem like the answer.
A shared IT resource with The Unlimited in South Africa recommended the use of Warewolf given the massive success they had had in automating and simplifying business processes.
A small team made up of a Business Analyst and a Warewolf Developer were tasked with developing a Warewolf process to optimise and automate the current semi-manual process. Additionally, the new process needed to integrate with DHL at the point where welcome packs were printed and delivered.
The Warewolf developed system was not only delivered very quickly, but it also clearly exposed each step along the way so that the process and status of the work was visible to the right stakeholders. Because of this, a huge amount of process improvement could happen at development time – an excellent value add.
In just 3 weeks, 160% faster than traditional development, the team were able to deliver the completed system – shaving a full 2 weeks off the 5 week deadline. Not only was the system delivered with the agility made possible by flow based software development, but it was also highly visible which meant that future changes and adaptations were very easy to handle.
Having the ability to manage each step of the process allowed them to grow and adapt to changes in their customer behaviour as necessary.
The full automation of the process saved 40% of the administrators’ time which could then be spent on further improvements as well as increasing customer service and fully on-boarding their customers.
Warewolf acted as the bridge between IT and the business giving the business leaders the ability to visually see the process in action and make better decisions based on this information.
| Step in SDLC | Traditional Development | Warewolf Development |
|---|---|---|
| Requirements gathering and analysis | 40 hours | 32 hours |
| Design | 32 hours | 24 hours |
| Implementation or coding | 192 hours | 104 hours |
| Testing | 40 hours | 40 hours |
| Deployment | 4 hour | 2 hour |
| Maintenance | 40 hours | 16 hours |
| Total | 348 hours or 43.5 days | 218 hours or 27.25 days |
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