Case study
Supporting the Complex, Growing Operational Requirements of an Entire Laravel Ecosystem
Summary
Worcester Bosch is one of the UK’s leading manufacturer of boilers and water heating products. As their extensive, business-critical digital ecosystem of websites, portals and applications has grown throughout the years, they required support to ensure that their platforms could continue delivering long-term value for the business. CACI became the lead agency for Worcester Bosch’s entire ecosystem of Laravel applications, supporting and scaling its ever-evolving requirements and realigning their digital roadmap.
Company Size
500+
Industry
Manufacturing
Products used
Laravel, AWS, React Native
Challenge
Worcester Bosch has an extensive digital ecosystem built on the Laravel framework consisting of multiple websites, portals and applications, providing business-critical information and services across their complex operations. This includes their customer-facing website; a professional installer portal; the back-office system handling enquiries and content management, MyBosch where end users can undertake administrative tasks related to their products and many more.
The complex application was built on the Laravel framework in one large monolithic codebase that evolved iteratively and scaled in size in-line with business requirements over the past decade. This means that there are numerous interlinked dependencies in the ecosystem that all need to work in harmony. Worcester Bosch needed a team of experts who could breathe new life into the ecosystem and ensure it could continue delivering value for the business into the future.
To rejuvenate the project in this way and ensure it was development-ready for new features, including planned mobile app relaunches including its Professional app, CACI needed to assess the entire Laravel application architecture, hosting infrastructure, and codebase to generate a roadmap of for upgrade and development delivered through Agile methodologies to improve the application’s reliability, scalability and performance.
Solution
We first completed a technical audit of the entire digital ecosystem to understand and identify the bottlenecks and areas to improve around the long-term stability of the hosting infrastructure to enable the future vision of the application. Then, working in partnership with the Worcester Bosch team, we put new Agile methodologies in place, helping establish a new DevOps culture, complete with team training. Underpinned by a bespoke documentation system; empowering the team to resolve tickets quickly and efficiently.
We then upgraded the application to the most recent version of Laravel to stabilise and improve the resilience of the application and provide a solid foundation for renewed growth. We also rewrote outdated test cares that saw improved QA efficiency, fewer bugs being reported and reduced time required for user application testing.
We recommended a ‘lift and shift’ of the application to improve hosting costs, sustainability and overall resilience. Planning and carrying out an entire ecosystem reprovisioning and migration in AWS in just 3 months; now maintaining a dedicated team that supports with 24/7/365 monitoring, penetration testing and automated tests to ensure continuous system uptime and availability.
After the AWS migration and application upgrade enabled Worcester Bosch to resume business as usual and restart their roadmap delivery, we then delivered an accessibility refresh of the main customer website, and built a new user-friendly, mobile Professional App in React Native in just three months. Something that Worcester Bosch had identified that would help it maintain its top position with installers against new market entrants.
Results
Our ongoing partnership with Worcester Bosch on their Laravel application transformation has delivered measurable improvements across its digital ecosystem.
After the full migration to AWS hosting, Worcester Bosch experienced a 95% reduction in downtime and incidents. Since we implemented improvements, the reliability of the application has increased by 32 times and the average page load time reduced by half.
We continue our work making sure the Laravel application is up to date, patching vulnerabilities found through pen testing and code audits, improving performance and security; on the latest pen test, there were no ‘Normal’ or ‘High’ priority issues. All helping the application reach its full potential, delivering on the diverse needs of Worcester Bosch’s internal and external stakeholders and their innovative product roadmap.
The new Professional App exceeded its download target of 10,000 downloads in the first six months and achieved a remarkable NPS score jump of +46 from the previous app, going from an average of -17 to +29. Installers praising the app for its ease of use and functionality: “really simple to use and now works for me” and the app recognised with a prestigious BIMA Award in the highly competitive Digital Product Build Category.
