How we used Oracle Visual Builder to beat our Christmas Covid challenge

With 2021 now up and running, it seems like a good moment to reflect and share a story from the end of last year, and how we used Oracle technology to rapidly adapt to a challenge thrown down by the pandemic.

Each year, Boxfusion likes to share a small gesture of thanks with valued customers and partners. But as 2020 ticked down, the reality emerged that most businesses across Europe were now seeing the majority of employees remote working at home. We still wanted to send out something - especially after such a difficult year for everyone - but there were some direct challenges to overcome. This also came against the wider backdrop of pressure on supply chains and delivery companies, we knew we had a far tighter timeframe to work with this year than in the past.

So we had a number of brainstorming sessions internally and identified three key issues to resolve:

1. How to get delivery addresses for all the individual recipients?
2. What can we do to ensure confidence in our personal data security measures?
3. How can we achieve this quickly and in an engaging way?

The Answer? Oracle Visual Builder(VBCS) #

We looked at a number of standard options such as email, or telephone, but found them to be either very challenging from a time and scale perspective (we were looking at ~150 people/addresses) or lacking in capability to deliver a quality branded experience. There were other options, that could deliver on those aspects but which we didn’t feel could deliver all the confidence in data security we desired or a seamless experience for collecting and making available the address data for use.

Where did this leave us? #

As a long-time Oracle partner and passionate advocate for their technology, we quickly identified that the Oracle Visual Builder product could meet our requirements.

Firstly, and crucially, Oracle Visual Builder gave us and our customers the reassurance of the highest level of security. We were able to generate unique URLs to authenticate the visitor to the app, and as a result, add personalisation in the greeting (which in itself is good practice to provide that added reassurance that the app is secure).

In addition to the security benefits, we were able to leverage some of the flexibility the platform provides. We were able to build in the features we needed in the app, with some personalisation, branding and conditional behaviour in the address capture form. The ability to have that branding was a big tick in the box for the Visual Builder technology and put us a step ahead of other options we had.

Finally, the Visual Builder platform enabled us to build out the app in just 24 hours! This was vital to help us meet the timelines we needed, to ensure the packages could get to our customers on time. So we were able to get from the completion of design discussions to a functioning, branded app that was mobile-responsive, in just a day.

Once we’d completed testing we were able to roll out emails containing links to the app. A little over a week later, we had captured the data we needed and organised with our suppliers to ship the holiday packages! Of course, last year was challenging for so many, and we were pleased to have been able to spread a little cheer and were delighted to receive a great deal of really positive feedback from customers and partners. And there is no doubt that our success was all underpinned by this exciting technology platform.

Summary of the key benefits of using Oracle Visual Builder #

There are three key benefits that led us to choose this technology - and why we think you should consider it in future:

• Agile: the ability to build our responsive app in 24 hours, hosted in the cloud, and deployed with one click, demonstrates the potential this technology has to flex to the business’ changing needs.
• Secure: We chose the built-in Oracle database, available with the platform, and therefore had the benefit of a 100% Oracle hosted solution with their full cloud security infrastructure.
• Flexible: Crucial for us was the opportunity to brand and customise our app UI using the standard web developer toolkit (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS etc). Being able to deliver the branded experience we wanted, in such a rapid timescale was the final tick in the box for using Visual Builder.

This short experience and our learnings from late-November 2020 have further heightened our awareness of the power of this platform - and we’re excited about sharing this vision with more of our customers in 2021!

Learn more #

If you would like to learn more about Oracle Visual Builder (VBCS) and what it can do for your business, please get in touch.

Contact us