Case Study · nicos
New customer portal with 360° information for a global network service provider
Optimising customer communication with the Structr platform
Customer
nicos AG
Industry
Network services, data communication
Country
Germany
Structr use case
nicos AG
nicos AG ensures secure data communication for globally operating mid-sized companies with their international sites and production facilities.
It connects them via wide area networks and provides a reliable, high-performance IT infrastructure and protected collaboration.
The nicos group consists of five companies that are specialised by topic and present on three continents worldwide. nicos AG, headquartered in Münster, Westphalia, offers every service from design and implementation to the 24/7 operation of secure, global data networks. It is supported by the skilled specialists of its subsidiaries woyn in the Philippines and nicos Australia.
To give customers the best possible protection against threats from the internet and cyber attacks, the services of the nicos Service Operation Center are complemented by the Cyber Defense Center with the specialists of the subsidiary nicos cyber defense. Researching and developing new possibilities for intelligent communication channels is the focus of nicos Research & Development.
The company now operates more than 4,000 network solutions at over 2,000 sites in 130 countries.
Key highlights
- Relaunch of the customer portal based on Structr and graph technology
- Overview of all sites, their service status and relevant operating parameters
- Integration of maps and status traffic lights
- Specialist in secure, global data communication
- Connects mid-sized companies with their international sites
- More than 4,000 network solutions
Challenges
Outdated existing customer portal (based on TYPO3 CMS)
Several different backend systems as data sources
Extremely fast implementation required
Challenge
A company's customer portal is the digital gateway to its customers. It optimises the customer relationship and makes it possible to exchange information and documents quickly.
What used to require an email to support or a phone call, with the ubiquitous hold queue, is now handled simply, promptly and without involving customer service staff by the customers themselves through the right software, in the age of digital customer portals and self-service.
In the customer portal they can retrieve information and status details at any time – ideally intuitively, interactively and customer-centred. Customer portals therefore offer two decisive advantages: they take work off the support teams and give customers a smoother, more pleasant support experience. At a time of growing market dynamics driven by globalisation and digitalisation, modern IT systems thus become a significant differentiator.
Read more.
For many companies, however, such modern, interactive portals are still a thing of the future. This is mainly due to the many legacy systems or monolithic applications that have grown over the years and stand in the way of a company's structural readiness for the future. These integrated and extensive systems often prove resistant to change or can only be adapted at great expense of time and money. On the customer side, changes to legacy systems are often not noticeable and therefore offer no real customer experience. New requirements, such as real-time processing, moving to the cloud or new interfaces to other company systems, are often not feasible at all.
These are questions nicos AG also had to address. In the 20 years in which nicos has been ensuring that data networks work securely worldwide, a customer system has grown along with it whose applications were programmed in different languages, optimised for a wide range of platforms and connected to each other via partly makeshift detours. In the end, the legacy infrastructure was anything but agile and also involved a great deal of maintenance and operating effort.
nicos AG decided against replacing the existing legacy system and in favour of a modern solution with the best possible transparency for its customers. Customers should be able to see at any time what the current status of their network is and what steps nicos AG is taking to solve existing problems. They should also get an overview of their sites and their service operation, service quality, bandwidth utilisation or site incidents. Everything was to be intuitive to use, visually appealing, simple and clear.
It was essential for nicos AG to have a fast implementation that ensures the system is not already outdated by the time it is implemented, as would have been expected with a waterfall approach and the corresponding up-front effort. So the decision was made for a new, solid foundation and a fast, future-proof solution from Structr. Last but not least, Structr's convincing combination and tight coupling of middleware functionality and a modern, secure web stack were decisive.
Solution
The existing nicos customer portal based on TYPO3 CMS was a conglomerate of different data sources, data logic and visualisation approaches.
Replacing the portal with a Structr solution and simplifying the connections between systems is greatly supported by Structr's wide range of functions.
Functional parts of the in-house development to be replaced were already included in Structr out of the box and no longer had to be developed intensively for the specific customer solution, only configured.
Read more.
Through various features, Structr was able to add a further strength: its perfect suitability as a link between systems.
In addition, a modern utility-first CSS framework (Tailwind CSS) is used, which Structr integrates optimally and which makes it easy to build modern, responsive application interfaces. Using the component library with ready-made visualisation elements also saves a lot of time.
In the nicos customer portal, for example, users will in future be given easy-to-understand data visualisation through the connection to an external charting tool.
There is already a clear, modern overview of all sites, their service status and all operating parameters. In addition, maps have been integrated and a status traffic-light system has been set up.
Because of the large volumes of data and their dependencies (network structures), using a graph database is extremely beneficial. Structr supports it out of the box and handles this requirement directly and without additional effort.
Test automation was also a focus for nicos AG. Using automated tests within a test framework (Cypress) ensures that features are tested automatically with every new version and that existing functionality is guaranteed.
- Relaunch of the customer portal based on Structr and graph technology
- Overview of all sites, their service status and relevant operating parameters
- Integration of maps and status traffic lights
- Architecture based on the separation of data sources, logic and visualisation
- Contract awarded: 31 March 2021
- Project start (kick-off): 16 April 2021
- First version with static screens: 15 May 2021
- New input from nicos marketing: 21 May 2021
- Parallel implementation of the functional requirements (May, June)
- Group and role concept: 23 June 2021
- Presentation to the nicos Executive Board: 30 June 2021
Experience it
The Structr solution offers numerous functional extensions, technical improvements and usability optimisations. This enabled the developers at nicos AG to build a modern new customer portal in a short time, integrate existing and new data sources and, thanks to its flexibility, implement future extensions extremely quickly and without major development effort.
The developers at nicos AG and Structr were in direct communication from the very beginning. As both companies follow agile principles, a very homogeneous and efficient collaboration developed early on. With the support of a Structr developer on site, the user interfaces were created quickly and a first prototype solving nicos AG's problem was developed within a few days.
The first version with a limited range of functions was ready just four weeks after the project started.
If we had built this system ourselves, it would probably have taken us two years. Structr implemented the system exactly as we envisioned it in four weeks!
Results
Optimal linking of existing information from several systems
The best possible transparency and usability for customers
Intuitive to use, simple and clearly structured
Quick to adapt and extend thanks to the low-code platform
Result
By using Structr, nicos AG is now able to access almost all existing customer data via the Structr infrastructure. By implementing Structr for the new customer portal, the part of the information that is relevant to customers can also be made available to them on the internet directly, quickly and securely, at any time and from anywhere.
Using Structr on the intranet and the internet enables much better use and linking of existing and new information. “We quickly saw initial productivity gains and a reduction in error rates. We were also able to significantly reduce development time by using Structr,” sums up Karsten Hecker, Head of Network Automation, nicos AG. The internal development team has a number ready for this: “It is at least ten times faster!”
Would you like to learn more about how Structr was used in this solution?
Feel free to contact us at any time on +49 800 / 78 78 287 or send us an email at contact@structr.com. Alternatively, use our contact form.
Axel Morgner
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