: We worked with a variety of business units, IT and CTW to develop detailed scope documents that established the application requirements and project scope for all of the different parts of the application. Along the way, we identified parts of the application that could be designed for significant reuse throughout the application.

Commerce Bank TeamWOW!

Company Profile

Commerce is one of the nation's fastest growing financial services retailers. Since its inception in 1973, Commerce has expanded substantially since opening its first store 34 years ago in Marlton, New Jersey. Today, the Commerce network comprises nearly 450 convenient stores and over 15,000 employees throughout New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland & Southeast Florida.

Challenge

Commerce presented us with a challenge to redesign the CommerceTeamWOW! (CTW) Intranet application while maintaining the existing legacy application. The goals of the redesign were the implementation of an enterprise content management system, Site Refresh, conversion of the code to .NET, and improve the usability of the application for Commerce employees.

Solutions

The first step was to document and assess the existing application, something that the previous development company had failed to do. The CTW application was a twisted mess of spaghetti code without any overall strategy for reusable code. Some parts of the application had limited content management while others required programmers just to edit simple text areas. In the process of documenting the application, we discovered significant security flaws in the application, and developed code to patch these holes.

Once the documentation was complete, we assumed the responsibility for day-to-day maintenance of the application from the previous development company. We also worked with the IT staff to develop a strategy to convert all parts of the application to .NET and Site Refresh. This 18-month strategic plan allowed us to find the “low-hanging fruit” for migration of large sections of content and target the larger and more complex parts of the application for redesign with more useful features.

We worked with a variety of business units, IT and CTW to develop detailed scope documents that established the application requirements and project scope for all of the different parts of the application. Along the way, we identified parts of the application that could be designed for significant reuse throughout the application.

A good example of our strategy is shown in WOW! Discounts, an application that allows Commerce employees to find exclusive discounted offers by business customers. The old application forced Commerce employees to scroll through 50+ pages of different listings. With the expansion of the bank into many more states, we recommended implementing better categorization and mapping for the discounted offers. Our solution integrated web services from MapQuest allowing Commerce employees to browse different offers by location and category. Within 3 weeks of launch of the new WOW! Discounts application, our partners at Commerce reported that for one of the discounted offers for mobile phones, employees had gone from an average of 10 sign-ups per month to over 10 sign-ups per week which resulted in a better discounted rate (from 8% to 15%) for Commerce employees. The overall success of this application was reported by the employees of Commerce as they found more discounted offers, and by the merchants offering the discounts as they reported more traffic to their businesses by Commerce employees.

Benefits

Content is managed by non-technical staff using a simple WYSIWYG editor and takes advantage of the customizable workflows in Site Refresh for administrative approval of new content assets. Object-oriented development strategy has produced cost savings from the reuse of code throughout the application. New designs for the application have improved the overall usage of the application by Commerce employees.

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