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Case Study: Unifying the Coworker Experience

Client: Global Furniture Retailer

Challenge

Global Furniture Retailer, a leading global furniture retailer with thousands of employees across hundreds of locations, was grappling with a fragmented and inefficient internal digital landscape. Their coworkers, ranging from designers and marketers to supply chain managers and retail staff, relied on a patchwork of over 50 disparate web applications for their daily tasks. These applications, developed over time and often in isolation, suffered from:

  • Inconsistent User Experience: Each tool had its own unique interface, navigation, and terminology, leading to a steep learning curve for employees, especially those who needed to use multiple tools.

  • Security Risks: Managing user access and data security across numerous independent applications was a nightmare, increasing the risk of breaches and non-compliance.

  • Integration Nightmares: Sharing data and workflows between applications was often manual and error-prone, hindering collaboration and efficiency.

  • High Maintenance Costs: Maintaining and upgrading a large number of individual applications was costly and resource-intensive.

  • Slow Innovation: Developing new features or deploying updates was cumbersome, hindering Global Furniture Retailer's ability to adapt to changing business needs.

  • Poor Onboarding: New employees faced a daunting task of learning numerous systems, slowing down their integration and productivity. This fragmented digital ecosystem resulted in low employee satisfaction, decreased productivity, and missed business opportunities. Global Furniture Retailer needed a way to streamline their internal operations and empower their workforce with a unified, user-friendly digital experience without majorly disrupting the functionality of the existing tools they relied upon.

Solution

Frostlogic was engaged to address these challenges. After a thorough assessment of Global Furniture Retailer's existing infrastructure and needs, we proposed and implemented a unified frontend platform designed to integrate all existing coworker applications under a single, cohesive user experience. Key features of the platform included:

  • Unified Interface: A single, intuitive portal provided access to all applications, with a consistent design language, navigation, and search functionality.

  • Micro-Frontend Architecture: Existing applications were encapsulated as micro-frontends, allowing them to be integrated into the platform without requiring major code changes or refactoring. This preserved the functionality of existing tools while providing a unified access point.

  • Single Sign-On (SSO): Implemented a robust SSO system, enabling employees to access all applications with a single set of credentials, enhancing security and user convenience.

  • Unified Notifications and Communication: A centralized notification system aggregated updates and messages from all applications, ensuring employees stayed informed and engaged.

  • Centralized Data and Analytics: The platform provided a unified view of user activity and application usage data, enabling Global Furniture Retailer to track performance, identify bottlenecks, and optimize resource allocation.

  • Developer SDK: A comprehensive SDK was developed, providing standardized libraries and tools for common functionalities like authentication, authorization, CI/CD pipelines, notifications, data access, and UI components. This significantly reduced development time and effort for new applications and features.

  • Personalized Dashboards: Customizable dashboards allowed employees to prioritize the tools and information most relevant to their roles, further enhancing productivity.

  • Role-Based Access Control: Granular access control ensured that employees only had access to the applications and data relevant to their roles, enhancing security and compliance.

Result

The implementation of the platform delivered significant improvements for Global Furniture Retailer:

  • Improved Employee Productivity: The unified interface and streamlined workflows resulted in a 20% increase in employee productivity, as measured by task completion rates and time saved on internal processes.

  • Enhanced User Satisfaction: Employee surveys indicated a 90% satisfaction rate with the new platform, citing its ease of use, improved navigation, and reduced complexity.

  • Reduced Training Costs: The intuitive interface and SSO feature significantly reduced training time for new employees and for existing employees learning new tools, saving Global Furniture Retailer 15% on annual training expenditures.

  • Faster Innovation: The SDK and micro-frontend architecture enabled Global Furniture Retailer's development teams to reduce new feature development time by 40%, allowing them to respond more quickly to changing market demands.

  • Improved Security and Compliance: The centralized security features and role-based access control enhanced data security and simplified compliance efforts.

  • Future-Proof Platform: The platform's modular design and SDK provided a solid foundation for future growth and innovation, ensuring that Global Furniture Retailer's internal digital ecosystem could easily adapt to evolving needs.

  • Faster Onboarding: New employee onboarding was reduced by one week by unifying knowledge transfer under one roof.

Conclusion

The platform successfully transformed Global Furniture Retailer's internal digital landscape, creating a unified, efficient, and user-friendly experience for their global workforce. By seamlessly integrating existing applications and providing a powerful platform for future development, Frostlogic helped Global Furniture Retailer empower their employees, streamline operations, and drive business success in a rapidly evolving market. The case study showcases the benefits of embracing a unified platform approach to manage internal applications, demonstrating a clear return on investment and providing a blueprint for other organizations facing similar challenges.