Case Studies

Increased proficiency through digitisation of Local Business Award’s core business processes

Dillon Da Costa
April 17, 2020

Local Business Awards is a 25-year-old local area Awards program that has been recognising New South Wales local businesses for their hard work and growth each year. They operate as a customer-centred business engrained in providing opportunities for businesses to publicly showcase their achievements.

Having a strong digital proficiency became imperative for the business to modernise its business operations. As a well-respected, long-standing program, there was an emphasis on ensuring user experience was not compromised, whilst updating core processes to enhance business performance.

Thus, Experience Digital was engaged to completely digitise the Business Awards operations through the creation of a web application that would transition them from their coupon-based, Microsoft Excel coordinated organisation. The brief cited complete digital transformation through shifting outdated processes online, whilst taking precise care to maintain the integrity of the awards program.

''I have worked with Experience Digital for a number of years. They have always done a fantastic job and deliver on time consistently.''

Operations Manager, Gianpaolo Sciala

Our approach

The Experience Digital team worked closely with Local Business Awards throughout the project to transition the entirety of their business operations from spreadsheets into a purpose-built modern web application. Encompassing the capability to handle core business requirements, the application enabled a simplified and streamlined process for the awards system.

With the customer journey at the forefront of focus, the functionality of the member platform incorporated the ability for members of the public to view online profiles of nominated and partnered businesses. The online voting system interface is easy-to-use, reliable and secure, reinforced with digital technology to increase the proficiency of data capture.

Additionally, Local Business Awards also required increased administration capacity for systems that run the awards programs to allow for required overrides and judging capabilities. This was delivered in conjunction with the platform facilitating ease of primary back-end management of the member platform.

The transition involved leveraging a range of AWS cloud services including Amazon S3 for file and state storage, Amazon EC2 for secure, resizable compute capacity and Amazon ECS as a container orchestrator and platform for managing docker cluster. These were chosen for their durability, reliability and fit-for-purpose capabilities.

The outcome

The outcome was a huge success. The creation of the web application and online member platform has meant that Local Business Awards have received eligibility for segmentation of business registration into local government areas (LGA).

Since the digitising of the program began, Local Business Awards have seen business participation go up by 15% YOY, and voter participation increased by 20% YOY. An improved user experience journey has been established allowing a gateway for business recognition to be simplified significantly and subsequently improve overall program quality.