Industries: Event Security, Entertainment & Live Events, B2B Products, and eCommerce

Company: A global provider of secure event credential solutions for the entertainment and hospitality industries.

TL;DR

We designed and deployed a new modern fulfillment solution positions our client at the head of its industry, which fuels rapid revenue and share of wallet growth, increases efficiencies & reduces human error, and opens up brand new business segments.

Our client, a provider of secure ID entry products for live events, festivals, and hospitality businesses, needed a new fulfillment solution that could keep pace with its customers' post-COVID rapid return to business. The company saw an opportunity to provide improved services for its thousands of customers and generate new revenue streams by launching a proprietary order fulfillment service.

Lacking the internal resources to develop a solution, this organization turned to DreamRock to design a modern, robust, customer and user-centric fulfillment system that could meet both its budget and feature requirements while being built on a modern, low maintenance tech stack. The resulting fulfillment solution has been a huge success, providing our client with an impressive ROI in less than a year, a significant increase in customer share of wallet, and notable cost reductions.

Results:

• 1,882% return on initial investments
• Increased client's customer satisfaction and loyalty 🎉
• New Profit Center to drive Immediate revenue increase 💸
• Reduced time to fulfillment ⏰
• Reduced labor costs 💲 Near Zero human error rate 🚫
• Reduced operating risk with deployment strategy 📉

About Our Client

Founded in 1995 in the UK, our client is a leading supplier of RFID-enabled secure ID wristbands, lanyards, and passes to live event and hospitality industry companies. Customers include global event brand names such as the Grammy Awards, ComicCon, Burning-Man, Coachella, and the Ryder Cup. The company established a U.S. branch in 2016 and has experienced rapid growth going from $1 million in U.S. sales to $10 million in the first 3 ½ years pre-pandemic.

The Challenge

In 2020, during the height of COVID-19 pandemic, our client's customers ceased holding events, so the company started producing PPE. In 2021, the company's customers began rescheduling their live events and hospitality activities at an unprecedented pace and in greater numbers to alleviate pent up consumer demand. Our partner quickly found its sales back to pre-pandemic levels. However, it faced challenges in ramping up its operations to keep up with the new demand. In particular, the company had no control over fulfillment. Its existing third party fulfillment company had ceased operations during the pandemic and other fulfillment companies were having difficulty keeping pace with the short event turnaround timelines.

Our client's management team recognized they had an opportunity to explore the possibility of launching a proprietary fulfillment solution that could meet their customers' demands, while generating additional revenue. The General Manager recalls the team's rationale, "We have always been first to market on technology, features, and upgrades because we are very customer-centric. Over the years we had thought about doing fulfillment for our customers because we already played a part in it. Sending our product out to a third party did not make a lot of economic sense."

By bringing fulfillment in-house, this organization could continue to build on its core strength of being customer-centric, listening to customers' needs, and innovating accordingly. The General Manager recalls floating the idea to their customers, "We asked them, 'If we offered this, would it be useful to you?' They told us that they could absolutely see the savings and efficiencies and that they trusted us."

Our client put together a team to start scoping the project, however, the company had no in-house capability to design and build a fulfillment system. The system they envisioned needed to allow for incremental investment over time and be adaptable to current and future uncertainties. Furthermore, the system architecture and deployment would have to be designed in a way that would be easy to maintain and not require internal IT support. The organization sent DreamRock a list of its requirements outlining its vision for a digitized, desktop based fulfillment system. When they engaged DreamRock to build it the General Manager says, "We were highly dependent on DreamRock to translate our vision into a working product."

Our Strategy and Solution

Discovery and Planning

During the discovery phase, DreamRock and our client's team concluded that the features and functionality of the previous fulfillment solution were dated and incomplete compared to what was needed going forward. The team decided to design a brand new fulfillment system based on the most modern tech stack and which could have another ten years of useful life. During this phase, the organization worked with its customers, internal staff, and a leading fulfillment consultant to plan the features and functionality it would need to implement a cutting-edge fulfillment solution. Some of the end requirements were:

1. A public API that would allow external stakeholders (customers) to integrate directly, thereby opening up business opportunities in the process
2. Agility and the ability to adapt to future operations requirements
3. A tight delivery timeframe for system iterations due to the nature of the scheduled events the system was fulfilling
4. A very simple and intuitive user interface that required little decision making on the part of the user.

DreamRock drafted a plan to first build a proof-of-value (PoV), which was essentially the smallest unit of product features that could be used to validate the probability of success of an in-house fulfillment solution. By testing and iterating the PoV over time, development costs were minimized, new features could be added on and tested over a short period of time, and bugs could be identified and corrected. This process allowed the team to steer the final outcome of the product before scaling it.

DreamRock president, founder and lead solutions engineer, Justin Bellero, describes the planning challenge, "Planning a system that has the minimum features as a proof of value is more challenging than you would think. There were many design and architectural aspects that needed to be taken into account because as soon as the product showed its validity, the expectation was that we would scale the platform to a more robust cloud-based version very quickly." He adds that during the planning and design process, it was imperative that the architecture of the fulfillment system remain agile and able to adapt to newer requirements for features, deployment, and infrastructure over time. "We focused on evolutionary architecture patterns to make sure we were able to build fast enough to meet demand while the client actively used the system in real-time."

Development and Execution

The product development approach took into account our client's intention to explore the possibility of launching a fulfillment solution and test the waters in a way that allowed it to manage the project budget and not overcommit resources. During the development phase, we used a mix of design strategies which included short-cycle interactive prototypes to demonstrate the user interface and began testing with the users and stakeholders to validate functionality.

Throughout the development phase, the initial PoV was improved and validated for viability in phases. The stakeholder acceptance during tight feedback loops held up against milestones we defined in early strategy planning phase. At DreamRock we call this the "Blueprinting" Phase. During development iterations bugs and other teething issues were worked out. One such issue was deployment, which was deployed locally on-premises at the time. The team understood a more robust infrastructure was required and we discussed several optimizations to be able to scale to a full enterprise solution.

The General Manager describes the benefits of this agile development process, "The PoV allowed us to assess internally if this was something we could actually implement and offer to customers. It meant we could test the waters with a few clients who found it to be very successful. The prototyping process went well enough for all stakeholders to conclude that there was definite revenue potential and that the solution presented an opportunity to grow an entire new segment within our organization."

In the end, the new fulfillment solution was validated and officially named. Our client's fulfillment agent end-users found the Fulfillment Platform very easy to use and the system allowed for process controls that could enable a new internal fulfillment operation that could possibly produce a substantial, consistent annual revenue stream.

Product Launch

During the deployment phase in early 2022, a small group of loyal customers started using the production grade version of Fulfillment Platform. The solution initially was deployed on-premise using existing hardware but was quickly moved to a cloud native deployment. In this way continuous delivery and deployment pipelines could be refined for future support iterations and to make sure that system maintenance runs smoothly.

Results

Reduced operational risk, complexity, and costs

The Fulfillment Platform's flexible API allows our client to reduce integration costs, complexity, and operational risk by enabling external sources to push orders in for fulfillment. In addition, says the General Manager, "By designing the user interface in a unique and intuitive way, we have been able to gain efficiencies that we haven't seen before with any product or service by virtually eliminating the chance of human error and dramatically speeding up workflows and processes." The company has been able to scale back hiring of seasonal and temp labor. The ease of use and system design also allow for minimal cost of ownership and maintenance.

Competitive advantage

Describing why this organization has been so successful in the U.S. the General Manager explains, "The customer's voice leads all our product development and innovation. The idea with fulfillment was that we would offer a best in class service and put ourselves at the front of the pack as a leader and innovator in everything we offer to our client base." Thanks to what the General Manager calls the "secret sauce" of Fulfillment Platform's customer and user-centric design, fulfillment is now a competitive advantage for our client.

This organization has always been very customer-focused, has developed deep relationships with its customer base, and accumulated 10 years of customer needs knowledge in the process, so it was able to design a fulfillment solution that is very customer needs-driven. The General Manager summarizes the advantages, "Fulfillment Platform allows us to accurately and efficiently fulfill an RFID credential against a database of ticket buyer information at great scale, with perfect accuracy, and in a timely fashion. It's not any one thing, but multiple things together that make it a top of the range, cutting edge, highly efficient system."

New business opportunities

Fulfillment Platform has created an immediate revenue stream for our client that has significant growth potential with both existing and future customers and new business segments. By enabling easy integration, Fulfillment Platform is more easily adaptable to new situations and business opportunities.

Scalability and growth

Our partner is confident that Fulfillment Platform will contribute meaningfully to its revenue growth in 2022 and beyond. Midway through 2022, the company had already booked a year's worth of business based on the capacity limit they set. The General Manager describes what's driving this growth, "The simplicity and ease of the API is key. We understood from our customers that if the solution was to be successful with them that it would need to lighten their load in terms of time and costs and not be dependent on customer integration work. DreamRock built Fulfillment Platform's API that way and it's been an immediate success." The ease of integration will allow more existing customers and new customers to easily onboard, serving as a catalyst for revenue growth.

Customer loyalty and share of wallet

Prior to Fulfillment Platform, our client's customers used third party fulfillment providers that did not necessarily understand their industry and which were not accustomed to the specific products and RFID technology-to-ticket buyer connection. Nor were they accustomed to the quick timelines demanded by the live events industry. Fulfillment Platform allows the organization to meet customer timelines faster, and as such it has increased its share of wallet for customers using the platform by a factor. The General Manager explains, "Some customers treat wristbands as a commodity, but by offering additional services to them it moves us away from being a last minute event afterthought to becoming an integral part of their event planning at the beginning. That's a huge jump and helps us differentiate ourselves as more than just the provider of wristbands."

Summing up the overall benefits of the new Fulfillment Platform solution the General Manager says, "Fulfillment Platform had been built by leveraging over ten years of experience in music festival and RFID fulfillment, and that knowledge has been interpreted through software by DreamRock, enabling us to create a product that is highly efficient, is everything the customer wants, and which enables us to scale."

Looking Forward

With just a small percentage of its customers and events flowing through Fulfillment Platform, our client has plans for additional investment and innovation in its fulfillment business. The company plans to build out capacity in its existing footprint and bring on additional labor to scale. It is also looking at automation and the potential of robots to perform some basic tasks to help with scaling up capacity.

In addition, the company plans to explore new avenues for the fulfillment business in addition to serving existing customers, by adding bells and whistles, coming up with new ideas, and so forth. For example, current customers use Fulfillment Platform as a bolt on service to a wristband order, however going forward they could engage with this organization on other fulfillment needs.

Throughout this future progress, our client plans to continue focusing on its customers and innovating around their needs with DreamRock's support. Speaking about the future, the General Manager says, "So far it's gone exceptionally well and it's been a pretty incredible first year. We are seeing many operational and business growth upticks from Fulfillment Platform and in the long term we see a huge potential for growth. The next few years will be phenomenal for us."