Introduction As one of the world's leading and largest graduate business schools, INSEAD offers participants a truly global educational experience. Established in 1957, the institution has a history of bringing an open-minded learning culture into its multi-campus model. Harvard Business School, INSEAD and ICFAI Business School Hyderabad are the world’s top three Business Case Study publishers.  The Case Studies published by INSEAD are widely consumed by academicians and industry leaders alike. INSEAD wrote 6 of the 10 best-selling cases distributed by the Case Centre in the past 40 years. INSEAD cases were the Overall Winner of 5 of the last 10 Case Centre Global Case Awards and are used in more than 100 business schools and universities around the world. They also wanted to reduce the dependency on third party portals to sell the case studies and wanted to offer a very elegant and smooth e-commerce experience to their users. The key points we looked at while mulling over the project resonated with INSEAD’s innovative mindset and its legacy as a business force that encourages diversity and risks in their entrepreneurial venture. Thus, our journey with them catered to their international brand image with a touch of unique quality Zyxware Technologies brings in each of the digital projects we have executed. The Challenge  INSEAD wanted to establish its brand as one of the world’s leading business schools. Highlighting the widely consumed and appreciated case studies they are publishing was one of the key strategies. In order to do this, they wanted to build a direct to consumer channel for marketing and selling case studies. In order to serve this purpose INSEAD needed to build a portal which showcases the high-quality case studies, they are publishing and highlight the brand value in front of its audience.  It was decided that the portal should enable case authors or their associates to create and publish value-added content associated with the case study they have written in the form of case microsites. This portal also needed to work as a thoroughly SEO optimised content marketing engine which will draw users on to the platform and help them understand the quality of the cases being published. A very clear focus was given to enabling a smooth experience for the user to evaluate the cases before purchasing those. Overall the key objectives of INSEAD were to Take control of the entire case publishing and sales system and drive sales activities Provide better digital experience to the case study consumers by providing   Improved search Improved navigation Personalized recommendations Digital assets associated with case studies as a value add Seamless case study purchase experience Dashboard to access purchased case studies and recommendations   Provide better digital experience to the case study team internally by providing   Full control of editorial and publishing workflows Option to build microsites for selected case studies to present related materials of a case study Option to present the case study in such a way that it will prompt the potential visitors to purchase it Tight integration with AKDMIA an internal system that host the case studies Case studies analytics dashboard   Promote INSEAD brand through the cases portal and thus improve the sales of case studies Capture the data required to provide insights to improve and optimize the conversion rate Implement tools to support and execute digital marketing campaigns   The road to the solution  A partner was identified to conduct the UX research along with our discovery workshops and to provide the designs for the project. The various stakeholders at INSEAD had done their prep work in detail and had every workflow clearly defined. Our UX partner who had vast experience in designing the user experience for some of the world’s most recognised brands helped us in bringing the research output into a design. They delivered excellent prototypes, information architecture, layout, and UI designs as per the accessibility guidelines adopted by INSEAD. After long deliberations with the INSEAD technology team, it was decided that Drupal would be the best choice for a webCMS for the entire web ecosystem of INSEAD. With this vision in mind and also encouraged by the availability of a variety of reusable components, Drupal 8 was chosen for the project. The checkout process would be handled on a Magento based system which was being used as a single e-commerce backend system used by the entire organisation. Easy discoverability of the case studies and filtering them using various facets was important for the success of the portal and Solr search was identified as the search solution. The publishing team wanted the capability to create new landing pages independently for new case studies being published without bothering the development team. Strict access controls were to be implemented as per the policies of INSEAD for each piece of content. A user management solution which ensures hassle-free user creation and assigning required privileges was also created. A key capability which needed to be built was the ability to provide personalized watermarks which will help customers to claim the ownership of cases that they purchased. INSEAD can also prevent unauthorized usage of case studies with the help of this. AWS S3, SQS and Lambda Amazon were chosen for watermarking to build a highly scalable environment for handling watermarking requests from any number of concurrent users. The watermarking system was built in such a way that it can be reused by the INSEAD IT team for other use cases by cloning it. An active directory based (ADFS) single sign-on was integrated to help INSEAD users to access the portal with their INSEAD login system. This made it easier to provide access rights to research associates, faculty assistants and various other internal stakeholders based on their role in the ADFS implementation. Project implementation  The project was delivered in an Agile SCRUM model. The entirety of the project was followed through these phases: Project Discovery phase  During this phase, we had multiple discussions between the project manager, technical lead, and also the UX design lead. Extensive research was conducted to understand the working of INSEAD and discovery workshops were managed to relay the thoughts on both sides. A project inception report that includes the communication plan, Project Charter, RACI matrix, escalation mechanism and high-level project plan was submitted at the end of this phase. Requirements Analysis Phase This phase itself was divided into three sprints, and more workshops to understand requirement elaboration was conducted during each sprint. This not only ensured proper communication but also delivered clarity to all the parties involved in it. The Product Backlog thus contained user stories that were revised and looked at during the grooming sessions that were conducted in the next phase. Development and Testing Phase Since we followed an Agile methodology, separate time was not required for developing and then testing as these happened simultaneously.  Deployment phase This is the end phase of the project wherein we focused on content migration, training, final configuration, and deployment. We also managed all change requests during this time. The basic outline of the workflow we formed helped in managing the voices of three different organisations together. The project manager of Zyxware Technologies remained as the single point of contact. Regular meetings and utmost transparency helped in pushing this project forward a seamless task for INSEAD and the UX collaborator too. Results  The end product we handed over to INSEAD was a fully functional Cases Publishing Portal with a revamped design and an innovative User Experience. We included a well-documented technical report and a user manual along with it. With the help of the portal, INSEAD got higher control and visibility over the marketing and sales of their Case Studies. The publishing workflows were also optimised and collaboration has been seamless since the launch.   Case Study Education Disintermediation Ecommerce Magento Drupal 8 Apache Solr

Introduction The client, a Europe based Food & Beverages giant, wanted to build a direct to consumer business for the first time. They wanted to speak directly and interact directly with their consumers. The project was conceptualised as an omnichannel experience in which the consumers could buy their amazing bespoke and hand crafted products and have them delivered to their homes. The consumer was being given the option to experiment with the flavours and personalise the confectionery as per their taste. They had around 1,500 combinations of ingredients and product types to create their own personalised product.The consumer also had the option of personalising the packaging and adding messages to the cover in case they wanted to gift the product. This was to be made available to the consumers from branded boutique confectionery stores, from an online portal and also from Kiosks placed in premium confectionery partner stores. The client had onboarded one of the world’s largest marketing and advertising firms to solve the primary problem of the lack of a direct to consumer touchpoints. Objective Setting up direct to consumer touchpoints was a challenge as they did not have the means to look at primary data on consumer behaviour. They were also trying to address customer shopping behaviour change due to the arrival of large online retailers. Spiralling marketing spend on various platforms was also a growing concern for the client. The marketing consultants wanted to build a platform which could offer Fluid interface with an app like experience Unified customer profile management Frictionless onboarding of customers Online shopping Ability to update / revamp the user interface without reworking the e-commerce part A closed network of kiosks in an offline mode Detailed reporting capabilities Multi channel order notification including SMS Tracking of parcels on multiple service providers Validation of deliverability based on postcode DIsplay of Instagram feed on home page The system should offer the ability to End-User a) Create a custom product based on type, ingredients and size b) Customise packaging and messages Administrator Order moderation workflow Order verification workflow Generate job cards for kitchen staff Ability to input ingredient and nutrition info Print ready PDF Solution Zyxware was chosen for the project primarily because of our expertise in building e-commerce portals and experience of having delivered projects in a timely manner for our enterprise clients. Our history of working in tandem with branding and advertisement companies to engineer their vision also played to our advantage. A tech stack of headless Magento to handle the eCommerce part and an Angular JS based front end UI was chosen for the project. The backend build is based on a KOT (Kitchen Order Tickets) workflow. It basically deals with transferring an order from the table to the kitchen. We have created a custom extension in Magento for implementing the same. It has been built with a drag and drop interface so that the kitchen and consumer can use it easily with a touch screen device. SAP’s Customer Identity and Access Management software (Formerly Gigya) was chosen as the tool to build silo-less customer profiles which can provide customers with a seamless and personalized experience across all digital channels. We have used ‘Worldpay’  as the payment gateway solution because of its state of art payment solutions. Worldpay offers quick checkout, easy order management and highly detailed and flexible reporting which made it a very easy choice. It did not have a Magento extension available at the moment and we have created a custom extension built for that. Another service integration done was for Route Genie - a leader in carrier management service. They provide complete control and visibility over the management of carriers, optimising the processing of collections and labelling through to track and trace all the way to the final destination. Route Genie is integrated with the leading carriers and provides real-time consignment tracking of parcels from retailer to the consumer. Route Genie also did not have a Magento 2 extension which was custom built by us. We’ve also integrated a solution to check the serviceability of the location to which the products are being shipped. The client also wanted to promote its Instagram channel which was being used by them to communicate directly with their consumers. An integration was provided to showcase the instagram feed on the home page. The project had multiple stakeholders for design, SEO compliance etc. So it is a complex project management environment. Results The website was launched to much fanfare and media publicity in the UK as a pilot in Q3 2019. Encouraged by the runaway success of the project, the client has replicated the same model in 5 more countries. The platform is now also being reused for another brand of the same client. Magento Case Study Disintermediation Digital Transformation Ecommerce