The project resulted in a custom, cloud-based application that allows F&I users at dealerships to create, sign, remit, and void contracts for services.

Service Group Web App Case Study | Inventive

Service Group Case Study.pdf

Turning the Page on Outdated Systems: Service Group Operations Leaps Forward with Azure

Meet Service Group, a finance and insurance company providing services to automotive dealerships. Over time, their operations had become tied to a legacy system that was aging, unstable, and held together by a patchwork of over 50 external integrations. With every feature addition, something else would break. Storms meant server outages, bringing trouble to hundreds of dealerships and customers. It was time for a transformation.

Service Group wanted more than just a facelift; they needed a comprehensive overhaul of their contract processing system. The goals were clear: reduce downtime, increase system reliability, retain more customers, and acquire new ones. They envisioned a design that spoke the language of clean, modern tech brands like Tesla and Apple. In essence, they needed a smooth, clear process that works impeccably across all devices, serving clients with ease.

Our journey with Service Group began with an in-depth analysis of the existing infrastructure and codebase, setting the stage for the development of a cloud-based architecture on Azure. This new design was crafted to integrate seamlessly with the old AS400 mainframe, implementing retries and fallbacks to alleviate frequent outages.

We upgraded the front-end framework to the latest version of React, leading to speed improvements, reduced loading times, and the rapid addition of new features. This transformation yielded a responsive user interface characterized by clean white space and modern design.

Feedback tools like Intercom and LogRocket allowed for beta testing, enabling Service Group to trial the new portal with select dealerships. This approach provided us with real-time insights, allowing iterative refinements to the user experience, ultimately resulting in a system that was not just robust and cutting-edge but finely tuned to the specific needs and expectations of its users.

Service Group's new application dramatically simplified their contracting process to just three steps, heralding a complete transformation from a once cumbersome legacy system to a sleek, modern operation. 

The new and improved portal flawlessly aligned with the AS400 system, showcasing marked resilience (even during a significant and unplanned Azure outage mid-project!) Through the utilization of failovers and replication, we safeguarded against data loss and ensured rapid site recovery.

This wasn't merely a technical upgrade; it translated into tangible business successes. Customer retention saw an increase, system downtime was minimized, reliability was bolstered, and customer acquisition received a noticeable boost. The project's achievements resonated on both technological and commercial levels, reflecting a solution that was meticulously tailored to Service Group's unique needs and aspirations.

If your company is wrestling with a similar software challenge or looking to redefine its digital transformation, Inventive is here to help. Reach out, and let's write your success story together!

Inventive developed and maintains - including SEO optimization - a state of the art eCommerce website for ProGrade Digital.

ProGrade Digital eCommerce Website Case Study | ProGrade Digital

Launch of brand new website and e-commerce platform

The partnership with Inventive allowed ProGrade Digital to enhance their services and offerings for any digital imaging professional who is meticulous about equipment and workflow.

“A critical opportunity for ProGrade Digital was enhancing the overall customer experience. This included designing a responsive WordPress website — one website, any screen — enabling customers to access the site from any device, as well as improving site load times to increase conversion rates.” 

“The Inventive team has been a core part of successfully launching our business. They could pick up the pieces of our broken site and build them into our vision for our brand. When we launched our company, people told us they were amazed we were as small as we were because our website made us look like a big company. 

We are happy to be working with Inventive, and I highly recommend them for any website project of any size that a company has.”

- Mark Lewis, ProGrade Digital Co-Founder and VP of Marketing

ProGrade Digital came to Inventive with an unfinished website done by a third party and asked for help building out its remaining requirements. Throughout the discovery process with ProGrade Digital, the Inventive team took the time to gain in-depth knowledge of the business. We worked closely with the ProGrade Digital team so we could move quickly and capture their vision precisely.

Website Development Services - Our Approach

ProGrade Digital’s website needed to showcase their products, ambassador profiles, dynamic news feeds, press releases, multinational support pages, and product specs in addition to an e-commerce platform.

Inventive’s website development process begins with a series of in-depth discussions with our engineering team to understand ProGrade Digital’s needs, wishlist, and vision to enhance the online experience.

Phase 1: Discovery, design, and build of the new, modern website

Phase 2: Continuous monthly support, ongoing development, and marketing program execution

Beyond standard content pages, ProGrade Digital wanted to grow their digital brand, acquire loyal customers with a new and enhanced customer experience and gain new insights with more robust ecommerce and marketing capabilities by offering:

WordPress custom fields, post types, and other admin customizations

Klaviyo email marketing and other API integrations

Custom membership portal design and development

Custom memory card / camera compatibility charts

Implementation of SEO optimization strategies

Analytics and tracking performance enhancements 

An Effortless Consumer Journey - UX/UI Design

ProGrade Digital prioritized a user-first approach in updating the next iteration of their website to yield a positive effect on these performance metrics:

Faster sites mean more customers will reach checkout

Faster sites encourage customers to stay longer and increase purchase price

Inventive created a bold color palette of dark blacks and grays paired with electric blues and golden yellows that play off the family of ProGrade Digital products. The dark base of the website served as a rich background for stunning and colorful action photography. On the homepage, the parallax of grids and technical patterns provide movement and interest around otherwise fixed product images. 

One website, any screen. ProGrade Digital needed its users to access the site from any device. Inventive took great care to ensure the new design would look great and function on any screen size.

Inventive first took the necessary steps to ensure ProGrade Digital’s sites could receive and send data securely through proper SSL installation, prioritizing the protection of their customer’s most sensitive information above all else. 

In addition, Inventive focused on ProGrade Digital’s site security with best-in-class WordPress hosting, site monitoring, and maintenance, managed Web Application Firewall (WAF), advanced DDOS Mitigation, and Cloudflare CDN, among many other security best practices.

Inventive brought ProGrade Digital up to compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by implementing safe data collection practices and cookie policies.

After integrating their website directly with their email marketing software, Inventive helped ProGrade Digital increase its newsletter subscribers by more than 10x and tripled their conversion rate from their email subscriber base alone.

Inventive helped ensure the uptime and integrity of the website via site monitoring best practices, including data encryption, core WordPress, PHP, and SQL updates, daily backups, and plugin vulnerability notifications.

Inventive was able to build and deploy the site in an environment owned by ProGrade Digital and has worked alongside their team in providing maintenance, content updates, support, continuous deployment, marketing, and improved performance post-launch.

What Was the Result of Elevating ProGrade Digital's Digital Presence?

In January 2020, we began a transformative journey with ProGrade Digital to revitalize its digital footprint and drive substantial growth. Our approach focused on amplifying online visibility, enhancing user engagement, and boosting revenue. Over four years of efforts and innovative strategies, they've experienced massive growth and set new benchmarks.

Our collaboration was the start of phenomenal growth in traffic and online visibility for ProGrade Digital. Comparing metrics from the inception of our partnership in January 2020 to January 2024 reveals:

A Surge in Monthly Total Traffic — We've witnessed an extraordinary increase of 349%, a testament to targeted marketing strategies in every digital campaign.

Growth in Monthly Organic Traffic — An impressive 554% rise in organic traffic resulted from optimizing search engine presence, enhancing content quality, and leveraging SEO best practices to attract a more substantial, engaged audience.

Expansion in Keywords Ranking — They jumped from 1,430 to 8,500 — a staggering 494% growth in keywords ranking highlights our focus on broadening ProGrade Digital's reach so that potential customers can find them first in search results.

And perhaps most exciting is the increased traffic that has led to an astonishing 666% increase in monthly revenue. 

The results of these efforts speak volumes: soaring traffic, skyrocketing revenue, and an expanded digital footprint that sets ProGrade Digital apart from the competition. We're proud to have played a pivotal role in driving growth and redefining possibilities for ProGrade Digital!

A Partnership Built On Innovation and Growth

Inventive builds technology solutions that solve complex problems across multiple industries. We live and breathe our mission of Improving Lives with Technology, taking product ideas from discovery to launch, and scaling our experienced teams to innovate and deliver world-class solutions.

 Inventive believes in making technology and innovation more accessible to all. We improve lives with technology. 10% of the proceeds from this mobile app development were donated to our Inventive Cares Fund. This project produced 115 engineering hours to help us improve lives with technology for nonprofits, veterans, women in tech, and first responders.

 Want to learn more? Contact us for a 45-minute consulting meeting to see how we can accelerate and deliver your digital products from start to finish.

Our automotive insurance client came to us for help designing and building their mobile app that connects a customer to their vehicle.

Pocket Geek Auto Case Study | Inventive

PGA Case Study-Update-9-18-20.pdf

A Fortune 500 Global Automotive Insurance Company Launches Innovative Mobile App Experience for increased customer connectivity and services growth.

150 Screen Mobile Application and Development Lifecycle

Our client’s service offerings to their growing global customers were dramatically enhanced by the Inventive team building a comprehensive mobile application. The brand-new application allows customers to easily connect with their vehicles for various service needs such as roadside assistance, ongoing maintenance, recalls, policy information, and many more upgraded experiences for car connectivity.

As technology evolves on a daily basis, our client had a vision: creating a cross-platform mobile application that connects a customer to their vehicle.

Our automotive insurance client came to us for help designing and building their mobile app experience. We launched their MVP project with a full-scale prototype phase and a detailed roadmap to implement additional features in a timed rollout over several phases. Inventive provided technical advisors, scalability and design experts, and deep mobile application experience to meet their business objectives. 

Making valuable customer connections and offering true customer benefit was key to our client’s automotive business, expanding the business with new product offers and enhancing relationships with dealers and service providers.

We view automotive telematics as a place that we should be innovating in. We’re developing a solution around an application that, at its inception, is going to be supporting the core business and will ingest information from these vehicles as telematics becomes more mainstream. We hired Inventive Works, LLC to help us develop the application for that.

When it comes to modernizing and inventing business-critical applications you need a team aligned to your vision, one who can partner to ensure your vision comes to life. Inventive brought their full team to the RFP and were able to deliver an early prototype and a complete visual design of the experience.

To help create and carry their vision forward, our automotive insurance client relied on us to help them fully transform, build, and launch their innovative custom mobile app development so that they could scale their business, nurture partnerships with dealerships and service providers, and expand additional global services to their customers in the UK and around the world.

In our prototype development, our team worked with our client to identify their business goals and their end-users’ needs to solidify the experience and bring the vision of the mobile app to life. By doing this, we can learn how something works and deliver a usable model of interactions before we even start development.

After a formal RFP process which included early prototypes of both design and functionality, Inventive proceeded with our discovery phase. We were able to present the company with a design-forward mobile application prototype build in just three weeks for product development approval.

Working with our automotive insurance clients, we were able to take their list of requirements and refine them over time, starting with wireframes, into clickable prototypes, and ending with hi-fidelity mobile screens for the entire user experience. The team collaboration between our client and the Inventive team was a true partnership to build the entire vision of this product with our discovery and development processes.

High-level whiteboard sessions to understand requirements and needs

Review of the current application  (as a user/consumer)

Technical deep dive into understanding solutions and needs

Proof of concepts created to support features

By design, the mobile application serves two distinct customer audiences - end-users, and dealerships & service providers.

Multiple integrations with existing infrastructure and technology platforms

3rd party API integrations with fuel.com, repairpal.com, NHTSA (recall info), motor.com, and custom developed APIs from our client

Starting from scratch, in just 20 weeks Inventive succeeded at developing an integrated mobile application that offers insurance customers a fully-connected car app experience while automating multiple back-end functionalities on the business side to scale across business units and vendors.

Working with teams to solve hard technical problems is where Inventive excels. This opportunity to work on complex integrations and design a robust app serving clients was right up our alley. Our design and engineering teams completed numerous UX/UI iterations and customer experience journeys to ensure this mobile application would help our client win the competitive edge they desired. We worked closely with the client, making daily decisions, and keeping all teams organized, aligned, and productive as we accelerated development and worked to launch the app.

Our UX/UI design team delivered over 300 user screens across the MVP application and our development team delivered over 40,000 lines of code.

Developing Solutions For Hard To Solve Problems

The mobile application is not just an application that runs on the mobile phone but also a complex suite of API calls for storing and retrieving data. Prior to the engagement, Inventive had a great deal of experience developing APIs for mobile and web applications. In one sense this project was slightly different - the client requested the mobile application make use of the relatively new Flutter framework which is written in Dart for mobile development. 

Flutter maintains the native experience and feel of the app, and performs on any platform. Flutter is relatively new in the software development world and the Inventive team was able to move forward quickly and make use of the increasingly rich set of plugins and tools within the Flutter ecosystem.

A number of the tasks in the application, such as creating a vehicle, initially took a significant time to execute. Keeping users waiting for API calls is never a good experience so the long-running processes were kicked off asynchronously.

The APIs relied on calling out to a number of third party services such as the NHTSA for recalls and VIN decoding and Motor.com for maintenance information. External calls such as these can be unreliable due to target websites being down or simply network congestion. In order to avoid these problems, Inventive used their experience with multiple strategies to increase reliability. 

Data persistence was handled using MongoDB, one of the most popular object databases. This provides scale and ease of use while allowing the team to move quickly and not worry about schema changes.

Inventive applied a Google Firebase integration point for analytics functionality to gather metrics on screens visited and to help analyze API calls. This allowed easy remote configuration to enable and disable features at any time, supporting a global rollout and overriding cost and pricing estimates as needed.

The team consisted of developers in North America as well as in Ukraine and Russia. This multiple time-zone based team allowed development to follow the sun. At the end of each team member’s day they would hand off their tasks to the team in the next time zone, allowing more rapid development and forcing in-depth knowledge sharing.

A Technology Roadmap With The Vision To Scale

This insurance mobile application supported integrations from several 3rd party systems allowing information to be quickly pulled in and presented to the end-user. Inventive knows how important it is to design a path forward from MVP to a comprehensive mobile application that includes the client’s long-term vision.

“The goal is to not only build a mobile application, but to deliver an experience that allows our client’s customers to be connected to their cars, with the ability to continue to build that experience to one that’s “always-on”. This development provides a great opportunity for our client to grow its overall services offering.” 

Inventive builds custom solutions that solve hard technology problems across multiple industries. We live and breathe our mission of Improving Lives with Technology, taking product ideas from discovery to launch and scaling our experienced teams to innovate and deliver world-class solutions.

Inventive believes in making technology and innovation more accessible to all. 10% of proceeds from this mobile app development were donated to our Inventive Cares Fund, allowing us to pay 500 engineering hours forward to causes such as nonprofits for veterans, women in tech, and first responders. 

Learn more and contact us for a 45-minute consulting session to see how we can accelerate and deliver your digital products from start to finish.

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