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Nov 30, 2015In our ongoing series examining case studies in the anything-as-a-service (XaaS) economy, today we look at an innovative Austin-based logistics provider who has the best kind of business problem.
When Amplifier originally signed the LIVESTRONG™ Foundation, they expected to sell a million units. Before the end of the first year, the yellow wristbands went viral and orders soared over 40 million! Being able to agilely scale operations and respond to that kind of on-demand growth is a definitive factor of success in the XaaS revolution. To accommodate this rapid growth, Amplifier needed to automate its processes without losing visibility into critical usage-based data.
The growing pains of going viral may have surprised the young company, but Amplifier took the opportunity to invest in technology to improve operational efficiency and customer experience. With a top to bottom approach, Amplifier implemented sophisticated warehouse management and customer-facing tools to streamline every step of the logistical process.
"Amplifier delivers a highly complex service offering. A customer signing up today can design new products, order large runs of those products or choose to have us make them on-demand," said Jud Harris, Amplifier's Chief Technology Officer.
Harris explained how the efficient streamlining of operations almost made it look too easy. "One of our biggest challenges was creating detailed visibility of our work, and exposing our performance back to our clients showing them the experience we are delivering on their behalf," Harris said. Detailed transparency on usage-based invoices not only reduces payment disputes and customer churn for Amplifier, but also is part of the exceptional customer experience they provide to their clients.
Having a system in place that can produce detailed, usage-based invoices automatically is one of Amplifier's key competitive advantages. According to Harris, "We needed a billing system that could handle the large volumes of highly disparate activities we performed for our clients."
Amplifier has processed as many as 30,000 orders per day, which can produce hundreds of thousands of related activity records. "The nature of our business is clients doing flash sales," Harris explained. "It can go from zero to having sold 50,000 shirts in a very short amount of time... Any time we want to cut an invoice, all of the detail is already there and ready to go." This ensures Amplifier gets paid quickly for services rendered and drives top-line revenue growth for the company. "Having a massively-scalable, usage-driven billing system provides Amplifier with a significant competitive advantage," said Harris.
Real-time, usage-based invoices are one of the factors that empowers Amplifier to be an agile "as-a-service" company that will be ready to scale up to meet demand anytime it is needed.
Please read this case study to find out more about how Amplifier transformed its business by automating the creation of detail, usage-based invoices for its clients.