BLI Rentals Improves Operational Efficiency Through Modernization

Working with D3V was hands down one of the best experiences we’ve had with a vendor.
-Lee Zimbelman, IT Director, BLI Rentals

Overview

BLI Rentals has been a leader in the rent-to-own industry for more than a decade. It has managed to keep its competitive edge over others by continuously innovating. One of its most recent innovations was to transition to cloud-native development.

Being on the cloud allows BLI Rentals to introduce new features, updates, and bug fixes to their customers faster, more reliably, and at a lower cost.

The Challenge

Existing Pain Points

BLI Rentals’ customers and employees complained about their existing pain points that plagued BLI Rentals, including: bugs, lack of features, and complex user workflow with their UI/UX. However, D3V’s Chief Technology Officer suspected that more problems could be hiding under the architecture. So our team did an extensive software assessment and developed a long-term plan to improve the company’s workflows and technologies.

Long time-to-market

In order to maintain the edge over its competitors, BLI Rentals had to improve on its long-time-to-market to be able to quickly introduce features, fix bugs, and most importantly, take action on customer feedback.

Intense Competition Demands Constant Innovation

Rent-to-own is a competitive industry where even the smallest competitive advantage is enough to make a huge difference. And so over the past decade, innovation has become a key characteristic for BLI Rentals and they wanted to be able to have important features, many of which were just ideas that needed to be coded into existence.

Dependency on Human Involvement

BLI Rental’s software development process was highly dependent on manual workflows which meant the development team was spending more time and money than they had to. This also made modernization more difficult.

We provided a reliable step-by-step plan to transform the application toward modernization, particularly moving the least dependent component of the system to Cloud such as logging to a managed solution such as Stackdriver Logging, modernizing the database by moving it to a managed cloud solution such as Google Cloud SQL, containerizing the digital application and deploying it on the cloud in order to use managed and unmanaged compute services.
-Steve Sangapu, Founder/CTO, D3V Technology Solutions

Key Accomplishments

Deploying Updates Quickly and Reliably

The first step to establishing better delivery pipelines was to identify the hidden pain points and reliability issues. For this, D3V’s CTO completed an extensive software assessment. The resulting report was the foundation for a long-term plan that was created in close collaboration with BLI Rentals.

Application Modernization

Application modernization was at the center of this project as BLI Rentals was not only looking to fix existing bugs and improve functionality but also completely change the way they developed their software. After a comprehensive evaluation, our certified cloud experts laid out their native cloud development options and helped them weigh the pros and cons of all aspects.

Automating Workflows

The second step to increasing productivity and efficiency was to either automate all of the mundane and repetitive tasks or to completely replace them with better technology. So we automated various business workflows that previously took up a lot of the development team.

Reducing Costs

Through automation, fixing bugs, and increasing operational efficiency by moving some activities to the cloud, BLI Rentals was able to reduce software development and maintenance costs while at the same time improving accuracy, security, and free up time for innovation.

I can’t tell you how many times where I said ‘I’ve got this idea’ and Steve just made it happen. When working with Steve it always felt like he was personally invested in making sure we succeed as a company by his contributions to our project. He was always responsive in his answers and provided us the technical insight to make sure we were accomplishing our business goals the most effective way with the proper technology while keeping our financial budget at the top of the list.
-Lee Zimbelman, IT Director, BLI Rentals