Renewable Energy funding acquisition portal

Customer Benefits

How has the effectiveness of the client’s (Renewable Energy funding acquisition portal) actions increased after the digital transformation with the help of Stepwise?

For our client – introducing a new strategy, savings and profits:

• For 1.5 years of conceptual work, the client had no practical end results (no MVP, no test version for end customers);
• Onboarding cost reduced by 80%;
• Acquisition cost reduction by 60%;
• Stepwise changed the philosophy of work:

1. 1. •      Output from the needs of the end customer;
      •      Market research;
      •      Data-driven;
      •      Product in focus;
      •      Building added value;
      •      User Experience and processes automatization in the spotlight;

• Submission of works by parties, according to priority;
• The MVP was established in 6 months, thanks to which it was possible to sell the platform to investors and clients;
• EUR 1 billion of funds obtained for funds acquisition for end customers – Funds acquisition raised by 1000%;
• Due to Software Development overall operation costs reduction by 50%;
• Correlating activities with EU directives;

For our client – time savings:

• Acquiring a new client = saving time;
• SaaS caused the automation of this process and the transfer of funds from the Sales department to Marketing;
• Quick reaction to Customer needs – customization;
• Scalability & High Availability by default – automatization;
• Globalization at European level due to EU directives;

Project Background

The client tried to create an ambitious and sophisticated SaaS platform targeted at the broadly understood Renewable Energy sector in the German market. The solution was to connect the world of private investors, visionaries and local businesses with the world of finance and corporations ready to invest in a quickly developing sector of the economy.

Unfortunately, after several months of unsuccessful attempts to work with the internal team, the client has stalled. The product was to meet high technological and product standards. A natural alternative has become an external partner experienced in creating digital products based on the cloud and perfectly understanding the client’s business needs. Thanks to the feedback on Clutch and an impeccable opinion in Germany, Stepwise was chosen.

Main Challenge

Due to significant in-house investments, which ultimately did not bring the result, the client needed a relatively quick result that went beyond the standard MVP. Within 6 months, a fully functional portal had to be created, containing core functionalities, fulfilling operational functions and suitable for implementation on a national scale.

Maintaining high quality with very short lead times required quick scaling of both the team and the platform itself. By the way, it turned out that Stepwise could not use the existing solution effectively and had to design the entire architecture of the platform.

An additional challenge was the complicated User Experience process which required many interactions. The results of the latter were used by the client’s marketing and sales teams on an ongoing basis.

Our approach

After the first workshops with the client and a comprehensive understanding of the client’s needs and what the entire sector is facing, Stepwise proposed difficult but necessary decisions to change the platform architecture. At the same time, we started comprehensive work on User Experience.

Working on the software development process to adapt to the dynamically changing requirements was a considerable challenge. Fortunately, the client understood the seriousness of the situation and fully trusted us in terms of the methodology of work and the selection of technology. The main goal was Time to Market. It required meticulous handling and controlling the level of technical debt in the project.

One of our core values, Automate Everything, has gained a new meaning in this project. Automating the process of implementing the application in development and production environments, including full configuration of scaling mechanisms, event logging and alarming, has become the most important advantage of this particular project, which was appreciated by the client.

Final Outcome

We provided the client with the expected solutions based on the best practices and work standards, and most importantly, on the agreed date, responding to dynamically changing requirements.

We are particularly proud of our flexibility and broadly understood consulting in the area of digital product manufacturing. We have proved not only to the client, but also to ourselves that we are able to create global products on a large scale within tight deadlines while maintaining the highest quality of services.