Incentive Management Platform

  • Unified administration console
  • Automated deployment of new environments
  • Multi-language support
  • 300+ enterprise clients
Expertise
Content & Document Management
Verticals
ISV
Technologies
.NET

Iflexion helped a US-based company with incentive management platform development to ensure consolidation of multiple incentive and engagement programs in a single hub.

Calendar
20
Duration
Months
Gears
4
Efforts
Person-months

Context

Customer

The customer is a US-based company that provides global clients with an incentive management platform for creating customized incentive, engagement, customer rebate, and employee recognition programs. With over 600 reward options to choose from, the solution enables various promotion and recognition schemes to be launched for millions of people around the world. Being a global leader in tailored incentive and engagement solutions, the customer serves 300+ enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 companies and the largest US brands.

Objective

Initially, the incentive management platform was developed in a way that each client used their own web system for incentive program building, operation, and management. As the platform had hundreds of users, the customer had to support a large number of separate web systems. It wasn’t convenient for administrators and led to system instability. Moreover, due to the diversity of potential clients, the platform required frequent modifications and adding new functionality. Within the current solution architecture, implementation of changes affected the existing system components.

The customer decided to update the existing solution creating new architecture and consolidating all the clients’ separate web systems into a single platform. It would ensure quick deployment of new systems, solution maintainability, scalability, and convenient administration via a unified management console. The customer turned to Iflexion for B2B portal development in order to resolve the existing issues and create necessary functional modules for their incentive management platform.

Solution

Iflexion’s team analyzed the existing solution, conducted code review, and created a technical document with detected issues and recommendations. As the solution required a complete rework, together with the customer we concluded that it was economically more reasonable to develop it from scratch than to implement modifications to the existing solution. Thus, we redesigned the architecture and created a new incentive management solution from scratch keeping it platform-agnostic and easy to configure, with automated deployment capability.

The developed solution is a platform for end users and employees that comprises:

  • Incentive program management part for end users to build and configure their custom programs using a diverse set of modules. End users can adjust interface elements to comply with their design guidelines.
  • Internal administration portal for content configuration and management, module management, user management, and client support. With the developed solution, administrators can manage and resolve issues without involving the development team.

To support multiple clients within a single platform, Iflexion’s team developed a multitenant solution architecture with a single global administrative console and separate admin parts for each tenant. To ensure the architecture supports adding new features with minimal impact on the existing functionality, we divided the solution into five functional modules with their own business logic, user interface, functionality, and rules.

  • Central module: client provisioning, content management, user access control, site administration
  • Incentive management module: configuration and launch of incentive programs
  • Reward management module: card and catalog management
  • Point-of-sale engine: client points calculation
  • Claim management module: claims for points.

This division helped create relatively stand-alone modules so that the customer can quickly respond to the business requirements implementing necessary changes.

Technology

The developed solution is a .NET application that has four main tiers:

  • Web server: Orchard CMS following ASP.NET MVC5 architecture, Kendo UI controls
  • Application server: uses OWIN architecture and provides Domain Services
  • Database layer: PostgreSQL
  • External systems: eCRM for email communication and POS for Points and Incentives Rules Engine

We built the frontend part using the mixed classical/single page application approach with the following frontend frameworks and libraries: AngularJS, Bootstrap, jQuery, Modernizr.

We implemented a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to ensure separation of work/processes and convenient implementation of new features with a minimal impact on the existing system components. For system stability, we implemented an optimal request/response size to transfer a minimal data set between the client and server, without executing unnecessary functions or database queries.

For user authentication, our team implemented Single-Sign-On (SSO) for all modules. The services from each module are protected using Oath security token.

Results

Iflexion’s team has developed an incentive management platform with multi-language support for clients located all over the world. The solution allows the customer to deploy and support clients’ websites within one platform, as well as provides users with a convenient tool for incentive program creation and management.

Initial solution review made by our team and implemented recommendations helped improve the code base and ensure the solution’s stable work. The redeveloped architecture allowed running multiple clients’ sites in a single app domain decreasing thereby hosting costs.

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