Full-Stack Development Supports Ag Dealers in Customer Service
An agricultural equipment manufacturer’s dealer web app wasn’t keeping up. Low satisfaction scores, missing features, and no clear product vision for the future. We helped them fix all three.
Opportunity
An ag equipment manufacturer needed to revamp their dealer web app, grow their Agile practices, and add features that would improve customer satisfaction.
Results
- 65%+ increase in app approval ratings
- Improved Agile practices
- Modernized CI/CD pipeline
Client
Global Agricultural Equipment Manufacturer
This client serves their dealer network and farm operators with software products across multiple product lines. SEP had previously supported their Agile transformation and product improvements on other engagements, including fleet management and embedded tractor display projects. They came back to us for help with their dealer-facing web application.
About the Client
Industry
Machinery Manufacturing
Employees
10,000+
Type
Public
Revenue
$1B
Opportunity
A Dealer App That Wasn’t Pulling Its Weight
The web application helps dealers create and manage service agreements and customer support plans: maintenance contracts, technical phone support, and other ongoing services that generate revenue after the initial equipment sale. A farmer purchasing a tractor from a dealer might also purchase a maintenance plan, for example. These post-sale services are a meaningful part of the dealers’ businesses.
But the existing app was slow and clunky. Dealers were missing revenue opportunities because the tool wasn’t giving them what they needed. The app had been built several years earlier without a clear product vision for the future and wasn’t designed for long-term manageability. There was significant overlap between it and other sales tools dealers use, and the whole thing lacked a user-centered development approach.
On top of that, tougher competition from industry software providers was pushing the client to invest in features that would move the needle on customer satisfaction. They needed to grow their Agile practices, implement a CI/CD pipeline, and revamp the app with expanded features, especially around reporting. They engaged SEP to help with all of it.
What We Did
Agile Coaching
Data Mining
DevOps
Full-Stack Development
Personas
Product Discovery
Product Localization
Product Ownership
Product Strategy
Road Mapping
UI/UX
Web Development
Solution
From Product Vision to Crowd-Pleasing Features
The first step was building a product roadmap. Agile product ownership was still a fairly immature practice at this organization, so our goal was to model and teach how it could be done and why it mattered. We took a user-centered approach, engaging dealers and stakeholders directly to uncover the features that would make a meaningful difference to their day-to-day work.
On the technical side, our full-stack development team split the application into modular components that independent product teams could own and manage going forward. This let teams develop and deploy improvements quickly and incrementally instead of coordinating changes across a large monolith. We created custom Jenkins CI/CD scripts so areas of the app could be tested and integrated continuously, which was part of the client’s broader push to mature their development practices.
From there, we focused on the features dealers were asking for. We improved the app’s reporting functionality and helped move parts of the application to AWS as part of a company-wide cloud migration initiative. Some of the original data visualizations weren’t accessible to all users, so we reworked how data was displayed to make it clearer and less confusing.
The most challenging feature involved providing dealer data in a read-only view. It required unraveling a tangled web of permissions and roles without damaging the live production app. It was complex, delicate, and left no room for error.
We also dug into the root causes of defects and common customer complaints. In one case, a messaging queue issue was causing significant slowdowns across the entire enterprise system. We identified the problem quickly and fixed it, which impressed the client with the speed to resolution.
Toward the end of the engagement, we brought a new internal client team up to speed to take over the work. The onboarding process we used helped improve how the client pairs up teams for future development efforts.
Tech Stack
Angular
AWS
Java
Jenkins
Oracle
PostgresQL
Rally
React
Spring & Spring Boot (Java)
Results
65%+ Increase in App Approval Ratings
The revamped app helps dealers better understand their business through streamlined features that put the right data in front of them when they need it. Internal stakeholders are aligned on a product vision for the future. And the client’s Agile practices grew meaningfully over the course of the engagement.
The bottom line: app approval ratings increased over 65% from where they started. The client set out to move the needle on customer satisfaction, and the numbers show they did.
App approval ratings up 65%+
Agile product ownership practices established and modeled
CI/CD pipeline implemented with custom Jenkins scripts
Monolith app split into modular, team-owned components
Reporting functionality expanded for dealers
Partial migration to AWS completed
Enterprise messaging queue issue identified and resolved
Internal team onboarded for long-term ownership