Cyclis Bike lease has been offering bike leasing contracts through employers since 2014. They offer a full de-leveraging service with 24/7 service and a network of more than 1,300 bike stores across Belgium. Every day Cyclis facilitates more than 35,000 cyclists.
Since the beginning of 2020, we have supported Cyclis in their digital transformation to improve their business processes and their customer and dealer experience.

Digital transformation of their client portals

The needs of Cyclis

At the beginning of 2020, Cyclis contacted Cloudway and AppFoundry because they were running into limitations of their original digital platform. The successful bicycle leasing scale-up had started with a comprehensive ERP/CRM package. These types of packages often suffice in the early stages, but as you grow as a company, you notice their limitations after a while. Especially since they were also using the platform as a corporate website and for various customer portals.

The limitations first manifested themselves in the user experience. A business portal requires an intuitive and user-friendly interface: you don't always have that when you extend an ERP/CRM package. Plus, the packages are often inadequate for the several needs of various users. Then you often must extend the solution, which makes it more complex.

A Smart Integration platform for Cyclis

This was exactly the challenge Cyclis ran into: the ERP/CRM system had been overly customized and expanded to suit the needs of the various users. This caused the all-in-one solution to start running into its own limits on a customer-facing level. Because the solution had also been constantly expanded, the workload for building and maintaining this platform increased. This had a direct effect on its throughput and time-to-market.

Cyclis therefore needed a smart integration platform that leverages the core functionality of their ERP/CRM system but translated the data and processes of this system into a customer facing website with great user experience.

There was a need for:

• A full redesign
• The development of a new all-in-one digital journey
• Disconnecting the front-end experience through the ERP and a redesign of the entire digital customer experience, e.g. the web portals for cyclists, HR purposes, contact with bike dealers ...
• Developing a secure and scalable integration with the existing ERP system.
• Developing a stable base to further expand this ERP system in the future.
• A shorter time-to-market, both for ideas and new functionalities.

Our serverless solution for Cyclis

For this digital transformation project, we worked hard – together with AppFoundry – to create a scalable custom solution. To map everything out first, we held a series of brainstorming sessions, conceptual and technical workshops. From there, the basis for the solution to be built resulted in:

• A complete redesign
• The technical architecture: Cloud native Integration Platform hosted on Azure
• Three statically generated web applications based on React and Gatsby.
  
  

There was also a need for a new customer portal for the leasing cyclists:

• Mobile first design: cyclists can use the portal on the go.
• The ability to create simulations and request quotes.
• Being able to independently follow up on the ordering process.
• Reporting and following up on insurance issues.
• Always having the latest real-time data in your pocket.

There was also a need for a portal dedicated to the fleet managers:

• For tracking, consulting and approving lease quotes.
• Real-time overview of all contracts.
• Fleet managers can easily export orders to Excel.
• For easy handling when the lease contract is terminated.

Finally, there was also a need for a dealer portal:

• To track and confirm orders.
• To have a real-time overview available of all current contracts and associated maintenance history.
• To follow up on insurance matters.
• To reduce paperwork to a minimum.

A smooth collaboration with improved UX

The collaboration between Cloudway and AppFoundry exceeded Cyclis' expectations. First and foremost, because of the rapid development: the first release was ready in just 7 months. But even more importantly: because of the positive feedback from the end users. The three different portals have one common denominator: very high customer satisfaction.

Do you run into limitation in the current systems within your organization? Is your way-of-work in need of a digital transformation? Let our experts help: even if you can't see a solution to upgrade legacy systems, our experts are trained to design and create Smart Integration platforms that grow with your business.