GWA Group: Modernizing a Leading Australian Bathroom & Kitchen Supplier’s Tech Stack + Helping Build Their Flagship Product

CLIENT

GWA Group Limited

INDUSTRY

Retail & eCommerce

FEATURES

Drupal 8 Development

PIM Integration

Kiosk App Development

Mobile Apps Development

Data Visualization

TECHNOLOGY STACK

PHP

Drupal 8

Acquia

MySQL

jQuery

Slim Framework

CakePHP

Angular

React

GraphQL

AWS

Highcharts

GWA Group, Ltd., has been a leading supplier of building fixtures in Australia for nearly three decades. Listed in the Australian Stock Exchange’s ASX 200 index, GWA owns and manages a portfolio of industry-leading brands (Caroma, Methven, Dorf and Clark) that are synonymous with style and quality. An international entity, GWA distributes its products throughout Australia, China, and the United Kingdom.

The Beginning: Upgrading GWA’s Content Management System

When GWA came to Net Solutions, some of their websites were using an outdated version of Drupal, the popular Content Management System (CMS), to update content on their various brands’ websites. Running an outdated CMS presents a number of problems, not the least of which is finding developers who can work with and support the older system.

On top of that, GWA was planning a series of innovations that included replacing their Product Information Management (PIM) system with a far more modern platform, and integrating a new system with an outdated tech stack would have proven impossible.

That’s when Sandeep Babbar, Growth Platforms Manager at GWA, came to Net Solutions. Sandeep commissioned Net Solutions to replace Drupal 7 with Drupal 8 on all their outdated websites—a project that evolved into a wider partnership once Net Solutions proved itself.

Did Net Solutions’ Developers Have the PHP and Drupal Knowledge Required to Rebuild the New System?

GWA needed a partner who was comfortable working with Drupal in order to have a successful migration, as an intimate knowledge of Drupal was integral to their mission. When they began their search, they struggled to find a single partner who could handle the wide variety of tasks they had planned (Drupal-based or otherwise), and they were concerned about the costs involved with managing multiple partners on different projects.

Then they found Net Solutions. Not only did Net Solutions have in-house developers and systems architects with vast knowledge of Drupal and PHP (the coding language behind Drupal)—GWA ran their Drupal sites on Acquia (an open digital experience platform for Drupal), and Net Solutions is an Acquia partner.

Beyond their technical knowledge, Net Solutions’ portfolio featured considerable experience in custom integrations for the B2B Commerce space. All these factors made Net Solutions the ideal partner for the initial task of rebuilding the Drupal sites, which paved the way for even more comprehensive work to modernize GWA’s tech stack and help them build what would become their flagship product.

The team really proved their mettle, and it raised my confidence for all future projects. Thank you to the entire development and design team!

Sandeep Babbar

Growth Platforms Manager at GWA

Integrating inRiver, a New Product Information Management (PIM) Platform

A PIM platform helps companies manage all the information necessary to market and sell products through every conceivable distribution channel. A robust PIM is essential for a company the size of GWA, but they were operating on an outdated homegrown platform that had become unwieldy, and they needed Net Solutions’ help to modernize the system. They also had to keep the legacy system working for 20-years for compliance reasons, while migrating all that data to inRiver‚ a more modern platform.

The Challenge:The biggest hurdle Net Solutions faced was that the benchmarking reports revealed inefficiencies when using inRiver directly. In response, Net Solutions created a pseudo-PIM on Amazon Web Services (AWS) that imported and synced XML data directly from InRiver. Essentially, this meant that the software that required data hosted by inRiver did not need to constantly talk to the inRiver system, thereby preventing slowdowns. Instead, Net Solutions could take the data, put it on AWS, and use AWS as the alternative, faster source.
The Result: The AWS-hosted proxy to the actual InRiver PIM greatly sped up the experience of the websites and apps connected to it, and the internal PIM received a UX overhaul and a refreshed tech stack. This meant that the GWA staff that needed to use it for the duration of the compliance stage would be able to do so efficiently.

Innovative Sales Technology Tools

GWA Engaged Net Solutions to Help Them Augment Four Key Sales Processes.

In-store Kiosks to Read Product Tags: GWA’s research found that when customers shop in their physical venues, they often want to get more information on the products that interest them. Online shoppers can learn more about a product with a few simple clicks, but in-store GWA shoppers never had that ability until Net Solutions designed an innovative system.

Today, when in-store shoppers want to learn more about a product, they can take a special tag from the product display and scan it on an in-store Kiosk to get more information. Plus, they can add the product to a wish list, which can be used to create a personalized proposal.
Virtual Store Walkthrough: Online shoppers can now use a photograph-based virtual walkthrough that provides an immersive 360-degree view of the brand store.
Sales App to Support Field Sales Staff: GWA wanted to provide their sales staff with an iPad app that would allow them to display products to customers in-person and empower the staff to generate proposals immediately, while they were still with clients.

The challenge was that the median age of GWA’s field sales staff was over 50, placing many of them on the other side of the digital divide. With this in mind, Net Solutions created an extremely user-friendly app that mature sales reps could use and adopt without experiencing frustration.
Connecting End-consumers with GWA’s Retailers: Net Solutions helped GWA launch a B2B eCommerce website on Drupal 8 that connects those looking for their products directly with the merchants that sell them.

Helping to Build GWA’s
Flagship Product: Smart
Command

After successfully implementing each of these successful projects, GWA felt confident that Net Solutions could handle anything they threw their way. That’s when GWA asked them to help with a key component of their new commercial water management system called Smart Command, which would become the company’s flagship product.

Smart Command is a cutting-edge solution that allows commercial venues (e.g, malls, business offices) to track water usage throughout their facilities in real-time. This Internet of Things (IoT) based solution was designed by GWA’s team, who focused on the hardware component of the product. Meanwhile, Net Solutions created the software that reads all the data and displays it in meaningful ways. This component is the central reporting interface that sits on top of all the data that the IoT devices generate & send about water usage.

How did Net Solutions do it? They created a visualization front-end using Highcharts. The data was taken from the MySQL instance where IoT devices feed the usage data. The thousands of data points were synced every few minutes and processed to show highly dynamic and insightful charts on a large screen in near real time about the water usage of various products.

GWA showcased the solution at the World Plumber Conference that year in Melbourne, Australia, and it has since been featured as an example of innovative smart-office solutions.

When I demonstrated the design prototype for the IoT platform, senior leaders were blown away. The designs are amazing and much better than any international design agency I had previously worked with. They demonstrated great design thinking, taste, and simplicity.

Sandeep Babbar

Growth Platforms Manager at GWA

The Result: A Modern, Competitive Tech-powered Business

GWA has long been a leader in their sector because their people understand the industry, their clients’ needs, and the demands of the marketplace. What they needed when they came to Net Solutions was a technical partner who could help them achieve the efficiency, flexibility, and reach that only a modern tech stack could produce. The partnership with Net Solutions made it all possible.

We were really impressed by everyone’s effort to work non-stop, each day and into the night, to support us with go-live activities. A lot of Net Solutions’ team members have gone above and beyond the call of duty, and this truly helped to ensure that we would meet our goals in a timely fashion.

Sandeep Babbar

Growth Platforms Manager at GWA

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GWA Group: Modernizing a Leading Australian Bathroom & Kitchen Supplier’s Tech Stack + Helping Build Their Flagship Product