Automating Sales Management for 190+ Electrical Installation Companies

Description

A developer of sales management software for electrical installation companies turned to Altoros to build a web platform that facilitates marketing operations—with a focus on scalability and high availability.

Brief results of the collaboration:

• The customer built a production-grade web platform improving marketing strategies for 190+ electrical installation companies that offer 530,000 electrical appliances. After receiving positive feedback from pilot users, the provider is showcasing the solution to 200 more contactors from the furniture and plumbing markets.
• Thanks to the chosen architecture, individual modules of the software can be provided as fully fledged systems, generating additional revenue streams.
• By integrating with EFObasen, a Norwegian base of electrical goods, it is possible to get updates on product prices, availability, etc.
• Now, companies can design a reliable and safe electrical installation at homes—in compliance with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) standard.
• Thanks to security measures in place, the customer prevented unauthorized access, impersonalization attacks, data leaks, and other types of vulnerabilities.

The customer

When installing electrical equipment in houses, it is crucial to abide by standards such as IEC to ensure safety. To achieve compliance, contractors select an optimal set of devices (light dimmers, thermal comfort tools, charging stations, etc.) offered by different wholesalers to design a reliable electrical installation at homes. With the abundance of available equipment, it is usually effort-intensive to check appliances in stock, compare relevant information (prices, etc.), and assemble solution packages.

Recognizing the issue, El-verdi—a Norwegian provider of software for electrical companies—wanted to develop a platform that facilitates sales management of installation services. Aiming to lead the market in Norway, the company also wanted to onboard furniture/plumbing contractors as customers.

The need

Comprising mostly experts in the electrical business, the company lacked the necessary talent in development. Relying on Ruby-on-Rails expertise at Altoros, the customer wanted to build a highly performant and scalable system to deliver it to 190+ pilot installation companies.

The challenges

Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:

• Multiple installation companies would store sensitive information (e.g., login, passwords, sales statistics, etc.) in the system. This way, it was crucial to ensure proper security.
• The system had to be integrated with EFObasen, a Norwegian base of electrical products, storing details about prices, stock status, etc. Since the system would deal with large volumes of data due to the integration, the ability to withstand high loads without compromising performance was critical.

The solution

Stage 1. After analyzing the customer requirements, the Ruby-on-Rails engineers at Altoros helped to identify the features to include in a minimum viable product and created a platform roadmap. The team enabled the modules to track sales, manage marketing campaigns, create solution packages or clone them from suppliers, etc.

Stage 2. Following the principles of a distributed architecture, the engineers promoted high availability, scalability, and reliability. To achieve unparalleled performance, the team queued server requests, reducing the response time on user interaction with the system to 500 milliseconds. Using Elasticsearch, the experts enabled database indexing, facilitating data retrieval, and full-text search. The developers also normalized and denormalized data to prevent redundancy and inconsistency.

Stage 3. The engineers opted for TypeScript and Angular to achieve ease of maintenance and enable code reuse. Usually, installation companies used tablets to demonstrate offers to customers on-site. For a generic visualization on diverse devices, the responsive design principles were used.

Stage 4. To prevent unauthorized access, the developers at Altoros enabled role-based access control and SSL encryption. Then, the team utilized a mechanism automating security checks to eliminate impersonalization attacks, data leaks, etc.

Stage 5. The engineers built RESTful API and integrated EFObasen to automatically update products across prices, discounts, availability, etc.

Stage 6. The developers automated marketing campaign distribution with Amazon Simple E-mail Service. With Chart.js, the team displayed sales statistics in bubbles, graphs, etc. The QA engineers implemented acceptance, functional, and unit tests.

The outcome

Partnering with Altoros, the customer delivered a production-grade web platform—compliant with the IEC standard—improving marketing operations for 190+ companies that added 530,000 electrical items for sale. The provider can now offer the product both as a whole system and standalone customizable modules, increasing revenue streams. The optimizations in place enabled unparalleled performance with response times during user interaction reduced to 0.5 seconds. The provider received a positive feedback from pilot installation companies and is now presenting the solution to 200 contactors in the furniture/plumbing market.