Overview
Designed and delivered a connected digital service platform for a building-materials distributor's professional customers, embedding estimating, tendering, ordering and project documentation into their everyday workflow, integrated across CMS, PIM, ERP and industry data systems.
Who This Is For
Professional associations, classification societies, industrial organisations, or B2B enterprises with 500-10,000 employees undertaking a migration from a legacy CMS to an enterprise digital experience platform such as Sitecore, Episerver, or Optimizely. Common traits: large content estates requiring audit and rationalisation, complex information architecture tied to legacy platform, regulatory or compliance constraints on content, and limited in-house capacity to manage migration alongside business-as-usual publishing.
The Challenge
Professional builders bought from whichever distributor was most convenient or cheapest at the moment, with low loyalty and often decentralised, ad hoc purchasing. The client wanted to compete on usefulness rather than price by giving customers tools to run their projects, estimating, tendering, ordering and documentation, more professionally, but delivering that meant connecting workflows across several existing systems rather than building another standalone shop.
What We Propose
As part of a Making Waves/NoA team, Russell contributed to designing and delivering a professional-customer service concept: research into professional customer segments and their real workflows; calculators for estimating roofs, terraces and garages; a tender-management module; a project-documentation photo app for iOS and Android; and roughly 40 pages of reworked professional-customer content. Delivery connected the client's ERP, industry product data, specialist calculators, a PIM and the CMS behind two of its sites, through an iterative, MVP-led release model.
Why It Matters
Beyond the transaction - purchasing tools connected to estimating, tendering and documentation, extending the relationship past a single sale. One workflow, many systems - ERP, PIM, industry data and CMS brought together behind a single customer-facing service rather than left as separate silos. Built to learn - an MVP and Lean delivery model that let the platform improve from observed customer behaviour rather than shipping once and stopping.
This work was delivered while Russell was employed at Making Waves/NoA, as part of a multidisciplinary delivery team. Any public information referenced here is used for identification and does not imply endorsement.
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