Engineering
Success Story: Making a purpose-built product to support your teams
Mar 10, 2024
Overview
Since its inception in America in 1883, FMC has become one of the leading global chemical companies serving agriculture and pest control with innovative solutions, applications, and quality products.
FMC’s use of advanced technologies and R&D programs helps grow the world’s food and enables innovation in chemical delivery. FMC contributes to a more sustainable approach to the development of agricultural and professional pest control chemicals and advances the manufacture of hundreds of essential products.
In 1994, FMC developed and launched Bifenthrin onto the Australian market. Since that milestone event, FMC’s Biflex products (containing Bifenthrin) have become some of Australia’s most trusted and widely used professional pest control products.
FMC supplies pest control products to over one thousand Pest Control companies throughout Australia.
Over one million Australian properties have been protected using FMC pest control products.
“It is great to work with an application that is not only easy to work with, but that you can trust and rely on.”
These warranties are managed by FMC Australasia and the respective Pest Control company who administered the products to Australian homes.
Challenge
The legacy system used to manage these warranties, including regular inspection requirements, payments to renew warranties, and alerts notifying stakeholders of expiring warranties, was met with issues by both FMC Australasia and the thousand Pest Control companies using this system as a business tool.
The system was labor-intensive, with high overheads and a poor customer experience.
FMC Australasia hadn’t anticipated the level of hands-on support and administration required due to the complexity of the system delivered to their market.
Likewise, Pest Control Companies failed to adopt the system as it was intended. This compounded the administrative requirements by FMC, as manual handling of data was required by FMC when the anticipation was for Pest Controllers to be able to simplify this administration.
The software package delivered failed on expectations due to the poor customer experience. Costs were indirectly incurred by FMC for customer assistance in the use of and importing of data to the system. Overheads increased.
Data entered into this system was not consistent, reliable, or accurate. In order to appease customer complaints, Business Development Managers at FMC wiped fees and charges associated with the management of warranties—a direct impact on revenue. Understanding how crucial the user experience was to FMC’s revenue and customer relationships, the decision was made to partner with Worldteam to rectify this situation.
Workflows
Without a proper analysis of warranty workflow and policies, the business rules in place for FMC to pay out a warranty weren’t bulletproof. Costs associated could easily be automated, and bringing in office automation into the solution became critical.
Solution
Worldteam, with a clear understanding of the business issues and system issues, partnered with FMC and Live247 to turn this around. With a team comprising System Analysts, Business Analysts, User Experience Designers, and Software Engineers, Worldteam undertook workshops, gaining an understanding of requirements and set about preparing a clear and comprehensive Scope of Works and Software Requirement Specification. These documents formed a clear guide on the deliverables and were backed by the outcomes of the project.
The User Experience
Beginning works on the User Experience, Worldteam’s professional User Experience application requests, with appropriate status management to ensure BDMs could manage their client accounts seamlessly.
A simpler interface would mean fewer support requests to FMC Australasia and would address the issue of increased overheads due to the support requirements of clients.
Business Intelligence
A core offering of Worldteam, our business intelligence modules allowed FMC and Pest Control companies to view a dashboard highlighting KPIs and critical tasks requiring urgent attention. Statistics that were otherwise hidden away were now highly visible, giving BDMs the insight needed to achieve their targets and provide high-level customer support.
Data Cleansing
Worldteam’s Data Analysts scrutinized the quality of data provided. With over 30,000 home warranties stored in the database, and 1,000 pest control companies, the process of categorizing and organizing warranties by crucial attributes such as Status (Expired, Active, and Lapsed) was conducted through robust automation techniques. The end result was a database segregated into categories, which allowed FMC to make clearer business decisions on warranties based on the state of the data identified.
This insight into the data allowed FMC to put in place policies that would both appease their Reseller base and also ensure FMC’s risk on warranties was controlled. This was a positive outcome for both FMC and their resellers, ensuring customer satisfaction was not unknowingly impacted by developing a new system to replace the existing legacy system.
Business Development
Working closely with Live247, Worldteam’s solution ensured Business Development goals were integrated directly into the corporate website and the new application. The commercial website (utilising the WordPress framework) was directly integrated into the system. New applications to become accredited FMC Pest Controllers were imported in real-time into the new application, eradicating the need for manual data entry by BDMs and allowing them to focus on business development.
Tools to assist homeowners were introduced now that data was cleansed, allowing homeowners to find accredited FMC pest control companies near them. Marketing initiatives like these were identified during scoping workshops as the various stakeholders involved in the project were invited to discuss and brainstorm further ways the system would add value to FMC.
Cloud Security
The solution was implemented on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Cloud infrastructure. Migrating to AWS provided FMC with lower hosting costs, a more secure, robust, and scalable environment by which the application would be backed by a 99.9995% uptime.
Worldteam’s managed services mean FMC’s new application is now supported by Level 2/3 Engineers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Worldteam ensures their environment and application is kept up-to-date, including patching, performance monitoring, and technical support.
Results
The results of a simpler-to-use, intuitive application displaying cleansed data speak for themselves. FMC’s overheads have been reduced by $150,000 per annum, while customer feedback on the new business tool has been overwhelmingly positive. Paige Finnegan, the FMC Marketing Manager, stated, “FMC is thrilled with the implementation of our new warranty operating system. Our costs have been significantly reduced while our customer and reseller satisfaction has significantly increased. The team at Worldteam really understood our challenges and found the optimal solution.” Peter from Northern Rocks Pest Control said, “I don’t need to hire a warranty manager anymore; the system is so easy and quick to use now that I can do it myself. I really like that I can get the warranty certificates to my customer at any time they ask.”
