Customer:
A Fortune 200 retailer

Business Impact Areas:
Product supply chain, Customer care and call center, Product intake center, Warranty lifecycle management

Solution Sets:
Customer relationship management, Enterprise application integration, Supply chain management

Business Opportunity:
The client required a web-based warranty contract solution to streamline and manage the consumer electronic product returns lifecycle, ensure effective customer care, integrate with shipping vendors, and enable warranty contracts administration for all of their customers nationwide. The solution needed to be used by a number of stakeholders including customers, customer service personnel and managers, as well as product return specialists.

Results:
ALTERthought collaborated with the customer to deliver a solution that is predicted to achieve return on investment in less than three months. Using its IterationZero^TM acceleration framework, ALTERthought compressed the project schedule by 15%. The innovative solution was delivered on time, on budget, and with quality. It leverages a host of open source technologies and frameworks that allow the architecture to be extended and integrated with a variety of enterprise applications. ALTERthought teamed with the client to engineer the enterprise-class, n-tiered application to serve as a cornerstone of the Fortune 200 Company's warranty platform. Customer's can now redeem their warranties, select replacement options, print shipping labels, and view the status of their returns on-line. Client personnel can efficiently manage the returns process and communicate with customers regarding their product and warranty requests in an informed manner.

Services:
Architecture, full life-cycle software engineering, Project Management, mentoring

Sample Technologies and Approaches:

• Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE^TM)
• BEA^® Weblogic
• HP-UX
• Informix^TM
• Apache
• IBM^® AS/400
• Agile/XP
• Tomcat
• Struts/Tiles
• Ant
• XML