In late September 2011, Electrabel’s new B2C site was unveiled to the public. Developed in less than 6 months, it was the fruit of the close cooperation between Electrabel, TBSCG and Emakina, the design agency that worked on the project.
A few months have now passed since the new version has been launched, and initial results paint a quantified picture of just what Electrabel has gained. Bertrand Gillet, TBSCG’s CTO explains that “the time-to-web has been slashed from 2 years to just 6 months”. “The ROI has been multiplied by 8, costs have been halved and the development cycle is 4 times faster”.
A project delivered in 6 months by a motivated and highly skilled team
“In fact we delivered a day early!”, Chris Goodman, project manager at TBSCG says. At any time up to 12 resources were assigned to Electrabel’s B2C website project, making sure it was delivered “in a timescale that is unheard of in the industry”, Chris adds.
This project is a great example of the collaborative work that the teams in TBSCG execute. They are able to work across geographical and skills boundaries maintaining a common set of Project objectives. Bertrand was responsible for not only crafting the deal but was also heavily involved in the on-going technical design. Chris has managed the client relationship while Blair Robertson, the Technical lead was responsible for managing the Technical design, consultants and development resources. “His role was pivotal in helping the PM understand in detail the technical requirements”, Chris says.
The TBSCG system administrators took care of the initial setting up of the hosted environment. The TeamSite / LiveSite development resources were responsible for creating template pages and components. According to Chris’ opinion “their role was critical as each developer must understand the business needs and functional requirements to ensure the development runs smoothly”. Last, but not least, the release manager was in charge of the release management process.
A flexible solution, tailored to meet the marketing constraints
TBSCG’s developers began by removing all the unwieldy customisations from the existing tool. They then retrieved the Autonomy package that Electrabel had installed and developed a solution that used standard functions to meet over 80% of the company’s needs. The result?
Shorter development lead-times.
TBSCG has introduced a “single source of truth”. All marketing content is now centralized in TeamSite and can be used both on the web and on mobile devices. It can even be used for print-based projects if necessary.
As the Electrabel teams needed to be able to concentrate on their core business, TBSCG offered to work on a
fixed-price basis and to take care of the
project management side of things.
Taking the logic of business separation one step further,
almost all the web infrastructure was outsourced to TBSCG, including the hosting. Electrabel’s technical teams could consequently focus 100% of their time on their core expertise: developing and maintaining business applications.
Outsourcing these processes also enabled Electrabel to
streamline its number of service providers. The company now has just two points of contact – one managing strategy and graphic design (Emakina), and the other responsible for all technological aspects (TBSCG) – making efficiency and reactivity the order of the day.