Client Success Story: Gold Canyon

Enterprise Party Plan Management System

The Company

Gold Canyon began in 1997 as a vision in the home of Curt and Karen Waisath. Wanting to develop a candle that would fill their home with a wonderful aroma, Karen began experimenting with different wax and fragrance blends in her kitchen. After extensive research and testing, the dream of the perfect candle became reality and Gold Canyon Candle Co. was born!

With modest beginnings and an incredible product, Gold Canyon's scented products have made their way into homes across North America and around the world. Based in Arizona, Gold Canyon is proud to keep the dream of "The World's Finest" candle alive as they continue to manufacture scented products of the highest quality.

The Challenge

In 2005, Gold Canyon decided to change its business model from a traditional manufacturer/distributor to a manufacturer/party-plan model in order to drive increased incremental growth. This change would grow their distributors from under 500 to over 60,000.

Accurate information systems are a key component of this change and adoption of the these systems by the new distributors is considered mission critical. A completely new ERP architecture had to be developed that included functionality such as complex order entry, mult-level commission tracking, customer care systems, financial integration, and back office warehousing and distribution systems.

The timeline from architecture design through system go-live was less than six months.

The Solution

Spring2 Technologies utilized its proven methodology and pre-developed SpringBoard components to meet the challenge. The following modules were architected, implemented, and tested within the timeframe given:

• Complex order entry Ð web-based order entry supporting five new order types, Complex promotions and incentives, tax rate lookups, and the ability to save partial orders.
• Advanced product searching and lookup, catalog searching can be done by partial or full number, name, description, etc.
• Secured multiple payment types and the ability to save payment information on payment types that include credit cards, ACH, on-line checks
• Order status and tracking, from web order entry through order picking and shipping right to a customers door.
• Back ordered item status and tracking
• Complex multi-level commission tracking
• Customers downline information and status tracking
• Advanced reporting for individual and downline sales
• Financial system integration
• Customer tracking and support including incident managment
• On-line distributor tools
• Back-end warhehouse and shipping operations

The Technologies

• Microsoft .NET framework
• C#, ASP.NET
• Infragistics web controls for sorting and filtering grids
• Microsoft SQL Server
• XML, XML listeners
• Spring2 SpringBoard .NET components
• Spring2 SpringBoard Data Tier Generator
• Spring2 SpringBoard Integration components
• Spring2 SpringBoard globalization components

The Results

Utilizing Spring2Õs proven agile methodology, early components of the system were operational and ready for functional review and sign-off within three weeks.

Within twelve weeks limited functionality was released to the distributor base. An "open beta" test site was demonstrated and opened after just 20 weeks of development. Initial response was that the system was intuitive, fast, and far surpassed the previous system. The site was brought live on target with the following results:

• Demonstration/test system beat initial milestone by three weeks
• Hundreds of distributors participated in successful pre-launch test
• 10,000 distributors logged in and had immediate access to critical information and business tools
• 600 orders successfully taken on the first day
• 7,000 orders taken over first two weeks