Application Development and Maintenance

Powering better vacations with CAI

CAI helps vacation planning company customize travelers’ preferences with application modernization.

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Application development and modernization can digitize your every need, even holidays

Challenge

A Florida-based vacation ownership company manages and markets real estate-based vacation ownership plans for more than 200,000 owners nationwide. Owners can choose from more than 65 resort destinations for their vacations. To help its clients make lasting memories and create “perfect every time” vacation experiences without the stress of planning, the company must be able to adapt to meet the changing needs of its client base.

The company’s client-facing websites and their sales and service software applications are critical components of customer experience. They needed to upgrade these assets through application modernization so they could improve the customer experience and foster the innovation and flexibility necessary to stay ahead of the market. Specifically, the company needed to free up key employees to focus on core projects, upgrade legacy platforms, expand quality testing, improve metrics, and increase overall efficiency in IT.

Solution

The company selected CAI through a competitive bid as a strategic partner to support, enhance, and modernize its web applications and provide quality assurance testing across all IT applications. CAI facilitated the application modernization and rationalization process for this client, which included a cost-effective on/offshore application management solution with 24/7 support that could flex up and down depending on demand.

CAI was so committed to improving the company’s efficiency upfront and to its ability to achieve productivity gains that it offered the company a graduated reduction in contract price each year for the first three years. This means, by the third year, the company was paying 15% less for the same services. At that same time, CAI upgraded the older .ASP applications to more modern .NET version and framework, including MVC to enable mobile. CAI further migrated key websites to Sitecore for content management, which allows business users to more easily make changes themselves and personalize content for different website visitors.

CAI also offered a lower-cost resource model that leverages the offshore talent and brought deep knowledge and delivery capability in best practices for IT processes and metrics. The CAI team created visibility into application support activities and costs where there had been very little, improved efficiency in targeted areas, reduced technical debt, and improved application documentation.

Results

The company now has modernized, mobile-enabled websites and a technology platform that allows it to extend its digital programs even further, providing more opportunities to engage with prospects and customers online. By leveraging the features of Sitecore, the company’s business users no longer have to involve IT for content changes, and it now has a simplified digital process for executing marketing campaigns that did not exist before.

As part of the company’s IT systems transformation, CAI also supported and helped lead a transformation from Waterfall methodology to an Agile model, which allows teams to deliver functionality to users more frequently and with better quality. Working in partnership, CAI implemented Jira for product backlogs and sprints with ZephyrScale for test management, providing full integration of development and test management in one environment. Through the test automation, CAI has developed, deployment testing has been reduced by more than 70%, which saves significant developer and QA time.

By eliminating technical debt, modernizing the digital platforms, and automating a portion of the testing, CAI is now able to spend between 70 and 75% of the development team’s time on enhancements and value-add activities instead of break-fix support – a dramatic increase from the 40% at the start of the contract.

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