Building a New Client Portal and Bidding Application for Flexco

When Flexco found themselves struggling with an ineffective and antiquated platform, they partnered with our LaunchPad Lab team.

The Client

For over 30 years, Flexco has served as a leader in automotive remarketing services, providing customized services for today’s fleets—from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.

Flexco specializes in upstream remarketing and collaborates with corporations to buy and sell fleets. With an array of service offerings, ranging from transportation to title and registration, Flexco consistently has large amounts of vehicle data to manage.

In addition to serving their clients with fleet management, Flexco is also home to ZoomWarehouse: a one-of-a-kind bidding platform for their client’s employees to bid on pre-owned fleet vehicles before they are sold at a private auction.

The Challenge

For an organization like Flexco which has massive amounts of data and information to manage each day, a digital product is mission-critical to powering their daily business operations. From powering fleet management to navigating their online auction platform, housing large amounts of data were key for Flexco. 

When Flexco reached out to LaunchPad Lab, they needed a partner with extensive expertise on the Salesforce platform to effectively migrate their system and integrate it even further with the ZoomWarehouse platform. 

Bogged down with an ineffective and antiquated platform, Flexco needed a trusted digital product agency to partner with that would provide a combination of Salesforce support and custom application development services. Their goal was to develop a new software workflow that would streamline operations for the administrative team, offer various services for clients, and provide an innovative vehicle purchase experience.

The Solution

After a period of dedicated discovery with the client, LaunchPad Lab split the scope of work into three key milestones:

Data Migration

Before beginning the design and development of the new client portal and bidding application, the pre-existing data needed to be migrated. 

The LaunchPad Lab team collaborated closely with the Flexco team to understand and analyze their existing data, which was not readily accessible through the current data vendor. From this discovery session, we began to map out a new system—including a complex data model that would ensure accurate data mapping. 

To streamline the data migration process, we created custom file migration scripts to scrape images and documents from Flexco’s original platform and upload them to the new portal. We also created custom data migration scripts to automate the data migration process—which ended up totaling over a million records.

New Custom Client Portal, FlexConnect

Once all the data had been migrated into the new Salesforce database, the LaunchPad Lab development team launched the FlexConnect client portal in Salesforce Experience Cloud. We began with a simplified scope featuring an authenticated portal where clients could easily fill out a form and consign their vehicle for remarketing. 

Throughout the year, we implemented a variety of updates and enhancements: 

  • Specific, custom vehicle condition and damage reports 
  • Photos for Flexco’s priority clients 
  • Custom reports and filtering for clients 
  • Reporting tables for various service offerings

All of these key features provided Flexco’s clients with more autonomy to create their own reports and deliver ongoing visibility on vehicle status. With all of the custom reporting and service offerings with detailed data and charts, the FlexCo portal is a comprehensive, robust self-service portal that provides a clear picture of all data.

New Bidding Application, ZoomWarehouse

The final step in the process was to create an updated bidding platform for ZoomWarehouse. We started by reviewing the functionality of the existing auction platform and determined that creating a refreshed brand guide would create a modern, user-friendly experience. 

To ensure the best UX patterns and logic for the online bidding process,  we also performed extensive market research into existing digital bidding platforms to determine best practices. 

The new bidding application currently includes the following: 

  • Vehicle bidding 
  • Vehicle search on existing inventory 
  • Calculator 
  • Admin interface that connects Salesforce data to vehicles and auction data  

In the future, LaunchPad Lab is working to develop dashboard enhancements for recommended and favorite vehicles, a picture manager for the admin team,  and other features.

The Architecture

  • Salesforce

    As a Salesforce development agency, LaunchPad assisted Flexco in building their products on Sales Cloud and Experience Cloud, two powerful Salesforce products. All products in the Salesforce ecosystem integrate seamlessly to provide a 360-degree view of Flexco’s customers and a single source of truth for all employees.

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  • Heroku

    Heroku, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, reduces an organization’s need for complicated hardware and foundational development to launch web and mobile apps. By leveraging Heroku as the foundation for Flexco’s digital products, we were able to reduce time-to-market. 

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  • Ruby on Rails

    Ruby on Rails is one of the most common web application frameworks that we leverage here at LaunchPad. To bring Flexco to life, we built some elements of the portal on Ruby on Rails to ensure optimal functionality.  

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The Outcome

For Flexco’s core business operations, the new system helped reinvigorate the organization’s overall workflow, keeping their data safe and streamlined. With the new system officially in place, administrative time is significantly reduced. Data and functionality for each service are now readily accessible. 

With the updates to FlexConnect, clients are thrilled with full-service offerings and autonomy for report data. The new portal also reduces the admin time spent supporting FlexConnect. 

For ZoomWarehouse, the updated auction platform enables users to make informed buying decisions through transparent vehicle information and tools which make it easy to check vehicle history. The new platform also includes a streamlined process to make an offer. 

The updated platform has also strengthened security challenges, resulting in a reduced number of unverified users with access to private vehicle data.

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