Woodmansterne

Bespoke Production Line System using WEBCON BPS

Woodmansterne Publications is a 3rd generation family run card business that was founded in 1940. Based in Hertfordshire, the core values and vision of the business is to interpret culture through visual imagery. The business has adapted to change over the many decades of trading from producing the first colour slides of the Queen Elizabeth II coronation to now producing a huge range of greeting cards, Christmas and birthday cards as well as many other occasions.

When Dolphin IT Solutions was introduced to Woodmansterne, the initial proposal was for us to take over the bespoke .NET project that had been delivered to the business for organising the production of images, cards and print jobs.

There were some issues with the application that needed urgent attention in order for it to be a productive tool for the whole business, plus there were some new requirements that needed to be built onto the platform.

Support for the application and the users was also needed as when the business was in the busiest time of the year, downtime and user issues needed to be addressed as a priority to keep things moving as efficiently as possible.

The Solution

After reviewing the coded app and its functionality, we proposed a different direction for the business to consider, in order to provide all of the requirements in a very short timeframe.

The proposal we put forward was to use our low-code platform, WEBCON BPS, to completely re-build the application, addressing all of the current faults and issues as well as deliver more functionality, to bridge the gap of what the current system couldn’t provide.

In making this proposal we were confident of delivering a complete working system that would require very little user training, as well as having the ability to grow and change quickly as the business required.

The speed of delivery in a low-code solution removes a great deal of risk and pressure from both the development side and the client side as we are able to quickly and easily take on change requests, and additional requirements, with little or no additional time and cost.

The business was very happy with this approach as it meant all departments could get one platform that completely met all of their needs.

The whole solution was designed, built and deployed within six weeks, just in time for the Christmas delivery period.

We were also able to migrate all of the existing data from the old system for reference purposes as well as integrate into their SAP system and other data portals.

We are now looking at other requirements within the business where WEBCON BPS can be utilised to deliver other paperless business processes and workflow applications, such as for invoicing, goods in, and stock registering.

With the platform already in place and no need to buy any additional licenses, it makes perfect sense for the business to optimise on their investment in this consolidated and flexible solution.