Case Study: FedEx Office Print Online

Background

Fedex Services offered two different browser based E-Commerce applications for digital print service customers, commercial and retail. Although both application share the same back end services, their user interface and flow evolved independent from one another resulting in two completely different user experiences.

The retail system offers more advanced user interface technology while the commercial system offers more customization. Each has evolved to provide different feature sets and customers are now asking for what amounts to a more common feature set serving both customer types.

AppFoundation was part of the FedEx Digital Print eCommerce team that was tasked to develop a integrated eCommerce channel than combines the advantages of both commercial and retail systems, migrate current commercial and retail users to this new channel, and position FedEx Office for future online revenue growth.

Design & Refine

The NextGen project intends to address each of the limitations through a technology refresh which will unify POL and DocStore feature sets and user base into a single maintainable software code base.

Adobe based Flex technology has been chosen to provide a feature rich internet application experience. User experience experts have been leveraged to provide oversight in the creation of consistent and usable work flows.

The result will be a completely new user interface layer and unified business logic. Other objectives are as follows:
• Customization and personalization capabilities
• Promote maintainability through software reuse and modularity
• Promote advance integration capabilities
• Smooth transition and retirement of legacy systems
• Optimize workflows for commercial and retail customers
• Employ n-tier architecture and service orientation
• Minimize change to backend business services
• The application should be flexible for 3rd party integrations
• Should be strongly customizable by internal and external customer
• Should be Service Oriented Architecture based architecture

Deliver

Users could now log into their account through the FedEx Office Print Online site to upload, print, and find a location to pick-up their documents online.