Business Challenge
The client’s product portfolio supports two market segments—surgery and therapy. The company, which has grown by acquiring competitors, obtained numerous products with similar capabilities. However, the products are built on diverse, mostly outdated technologies, using different architectures, data schemes, and UX approaches. Previously, they attempted to migrate customers from one product to another in order to “sunset” the software; however, it was not successful. The client was obliged to maintain its legacy products, while providing new capabilities to retain customers and keep products in compliance with new regulations (e.g. MU2). This resulted in a high total cost of ownership (TCO) and the company being less profitable.
Having five products with similar capabilities presented business challenges for the client that included:
- Keeping all products in compliance with new regulations
- Providing new features for all products
- Deploying new versions to the client’s environments (x5)
- Supporting multiple p roduct versions for all products
- Maintaining expertise in all products
- Marketing all products
Project Description
The SoftServe team led by the principal software architect and business analyst (BA) helped the client develop a modern and transitional roadmap for the new SaaS platform and its implementation.
The new platform offered a new look and feel, encompassed and replaced the capabilities of the legacy products, and enhanced them. Since the implementation of the new platform was expected to take 4-5 years, SoftServe’s BA team recommended an iterative and incremental solution development to the client.
Taking into account the risks of the “big bang” approach for the new platform launch, SoftServe’s BA team recommended the lean incremental replacement of existing capabilities as the main approach. The new platform capabilities would be integrated with the legacy systems in order to support the end-to-end process.
The benefits of this approach are:
- Showing instant progress to the customers
- Getting faster feedback about the new product
- Getting customers accustomed to the new product
- Eliminating risk of product failure with a soft product launch
- Reducing investments in legacy products
To accelerate progress on the new SaaS platform, the SoftServe team conducted development in several simultaneous streams (i.e. front-desk and billing projects) with each stream having the appropriate architecture, BA, and UX governance.
Value Delivered
Upon completion of this engagement, the client:
- Reduced product TCO by 60%
- Improved its win/loss and customer retention ratio
- Enhanced the user experience—making the application easy to use
- Saved $300,000 annually on licenses
- Sunset its first legacy product i n 5 years