Overview
WikiGear Inc. (WG) manufactures and sells sportswear and casual apparel, mainly in North America. The company’s sportswear lines focus on hockey, baseball, and running (mainly shirts, underwear, and socks made from moisture-wicking fabric). The company also offers a limited range of casual wear, including sweatpants, shirts, and jackets. While the primary target market is athletes, the company also markets to non-athletes. The company currently manufactures all of its gear in Winnipeg and Nebraska.
Problem Statement
A national pastime in Canada, hockey’s popularity in the United States had been increasing rapidly over the past decade. This increase had led to a substantial demand for hockey equipment and, as a result, new entrants had become players in the expansion market. Dover and Grecia, both hockey players, were disappointed with the quality of the hockey apparel worn underneath the protective equipment (namely, the shirt, underwear, and socks). They agreed that it was either low quality (i.e., it retained perspiration) or, in cases where the manufacturer used moisture-wicking fabric, it was overpriced. They pooled their scarce resources and launched a very limited but good-quality product line at a decent price. WG was incorporated in 2003 (each founder becoming a co-CEO) and continued to expand its product line in subsequent years to include gloves, jackets, hats, and shoes.
Solution
Initially, wg’s business model was premised on providing high-value, fast-drying, moisture-wicking Sportswear for serious athletes (the “wiki” in the company’s name means “quick” and is also similar to “wicking”). Although non-athletes became moderate consumers of wg apparel, for several years the Company’s primary focus remained on manufacturing and selling sportswear. The fitness world continued To evolve, however, and over time, north american society began to feel that being a serious athlete Was not necessarily a precursor to purchasing and wearing athletic apparel-looking athletic was in. In 2007, wg expanded into casual wear that became very popular among athletes and non-athletes alike.
In 2009, dover and grecia decided that they should divide their duties. Each would continue in the Role of co-ceo, but grecia would focus on expanding the casual wear line (both the product lines and The market) and dover would devote additional attention to increasing market share in the sportswear Line. While this division made sense, by early 2011 it had become evident that dover and grecia no Longer shared a common vision. This led to some confusion in the messages being communicated Throughout the company.
Technical Challenges
- Acknowledging this, the co-CEOs tasked Mumtaz Singh, the new vice-president of human resources, with identifying a tool that would get the entire company on the same page and enable employees to support the company’s overall mission of “promoting the sales of WG products through retail outlets and the online store through high-quality, reasonably priced sportswear and casual wear.”
- Singh, who was familiar with a performance measurement tool called the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), assembled a cross-functional team who produced a scorecard that could be displayed and discussed using PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets. While most employees (including the co-CEOs) were intrigued, the project stalled, largely due to the difficulty in compiling and circulating results. This took much more time and resources than anyone had realized.
- Strategy mapping (Figure 1) is a strategic tool that has revolutionized the way strategy is formulated and executed. It was introduced in 2000 by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, and it quickly became a popular tool for organizations to depict and execute strategy. By diagramming cause-and-effect linkages, an organization’s strategy can be depicted in such a way that it is clear not just to those formulating the strategy, but to the employees who are charged with executing the strategy. Strategy mapping alleviates many communication issues through the use of pictures; something almost everyone can understand. More information can be found in CPA Canada’s guideline Strategy Mapping: Applying a six-step process to your organization.
Our Technical Expertise
Our approach allowed us to provide our client with:
- An optimized, transparent and predictable development process with defined roles and iterations.
- A continuous delivery model and timely product deployment.
- Superior quality of code due to continuous integration practices that control defects during build and integration sprint cycles.
- A maintainable and scalable product thanks to a properly designed architecture and properly refactored code.
- Enhanced collaboration between product owners and development teams.
- A quality assurance competency lead who is responsible for setting up all test case tools.
Key Features
- Cloud-based Fin Tech platform.
- Credit and CIBIL Report.
- Compare Mutual Funds.
- Compare Loans & Cards.
- Quick approval and online Processing.
Tech Stack
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- Laravel 5.2
- My SQLi
- HTML5, CSS3
- JS, Jquery
- Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator