Growing IT Ecosystem to Meet Business Expansion Goals

The United Repair Centre (URC) provides B2B clothing repair services, extending the life of leading brands’ garments and promoting sustainable fashion. The Client planned to expand into EU markets and needed to ensure the IT ecosystem could handle an increasing client base and order count. Thus, the URC engaged us to help prepare for the upcoming business growth.

One of the priorities for the expansion was to ensure the URC IT ecosystem is hardened against potential attacks. So, we helped the Client run a security audit and meet the Center for Internet Security (CIS) Benchmark requirements first. Next, we moved to the development phase:

• Extended the Repairing Order Management platform with 10 more B2B portals for Patagonia, Lululemon, Rapha, The North Face, and other brands
• Created a new B2C portal to unlock an additional revenue stream from direct-to-customer repairs
• Enhanced the decision-making process by integrating analytics and data visualization tools
• Improved customer communication workflow to promptly notify users about their order status.

As a part of the onboarding process, the URC creates a dedicated service portal for each brand on their MS Power Pages-based platform. Yet, the growing customer base pushed the platform to its limits, requiring a more robust setup to keep up with expansion.

Our team elaborated a new technical strategy for scaling and suggested extending the platform with B2B portals on top of MS Power Apps. This way, we could swiftly launch portals and streamline the onboarding. The Client liked the idea, so we built 5 B2B portals and decided to add 5 more for future needs. It turned out right, as 8 portals are already in use by the URC partners.

• Created a structure for each portal based on the individual brand preferences, customer flow, and requests
• Connected portals with brand websites to enable routing repair orders from their own websites
• Integrated Google Analytics and Power BI dashboards to visualize key metrics and track portals’ performance
• Implemented bulk editing feature to update, modify, and manage large amounts of data, ensuring its consistency.

Initially, the URC’s service flow relied solely on in-store staff who placed repair orders through B2B portals on behalf of their customers. The model worked well, but as the business grew, the URC decided to extend it with a new sales channel for end-customers to order their services directly.

Thus, our next focus was on building the very first B2C portal for Gore-Tex customers. We used MS Power Apps to streamline its development, and now the portal is already in use. It offers a full self-service experience for users, allowing them to place orders, choose a delivery option, and pay for services online. Apart from that, our team:

• Automated MS Outlook email communication with customers to notify them about their order status
• Integrated the SendGrid service to prevent the URC emails from being marked as spam
• Configured API keys for payment system integrations for secure and smooth transactions
• Introduced a custom invoice export feature to ensure efficient payment tracking and financial management.