USFCR Case Study | RevStar Consulting

Summary

Type of Product

SaaS Platform

Business Vertical

Government Contracting

Service

Full-service Development Team—Product Manager, UX/UI Designer, Full-stack Developers, Technical Lead, DevOps Engineer, Quality Assurance Engineer

Tech Used

ReactJS + NodeJS + AWS

Description

A web portal to access and manage government contracts, along with an associated administrative portal to manage clients and subscriptions.

Results

To get the US Federal Contractor Registration ready for growth we built them a new architecture on AWS and redesigned their legacy portal into a modern, robust, user-friendly SaaS platform.

The Client

US Federal Contractor Registration (USFCR) is the largest and most trusted System for Award Management (SAM) registration and renewal services. USFCR has completed over 100,000 compliant SAM registrations for businesses and nonprofits during their 10 years in business. They also provide set-aside registrations and certifications, including women-owned, veteran-owned, HUBZone, 8(a) Business Development Program, and other federal contracting services, training, and technology.

The Challenge

USFCR had a legacy platform that was both technically and visually dated. They wanted to completely redesign the UI while also adding new features for a better and more seamless customer experience. The long-term goal was to rebuild the existing platform into a tiered subscription SaaS product, built to handle unlockable features and different role types.

The internal USFCR IT team didn’t have the capacity to achieve the application rewrite and needed a partner that could work with them to define a backlog of requirements, mock up a user-friendly UI, and architect a robust solution that would allow for scaling and customization as their client base grew.

The legacy platform was hosted on DigitalOcean and needed to be rebuilt and moved to AWS for faster and better data management. In addition, new data sources needed to be added to give the platform an edge over competing platforms.

The system also needed to be closely integrated with Salesforce for a more seamless customer acquisition process. To manage the new platform fully as a SaaS product a brand new administrative portal also had to be designed and built so that different subscription tiers could be configured and sold by the sales team.

The Problem

To expand its business USFCR needed to upgrade its existing platform into a more modern, scalable, and customizable system that would allow them to provide different types of product offerings through a tiered subscription model. Without adequate internal resources, they needed a partner that could understand their business requirements and then quickly translate those requirements into a working product that they could bring to market.

The Solution

We analyzed the business needs and then provided a dedicated team to architect, design, manage, and develop a competitive product that could be added to over time as new sales opportunities were defined.

What We Built

We first architected a new project infrastructure that would allow us to move the application from DigitalOcean over to AWS and give us the foundation needed to expand the platform.

We then went through a UI design phase, defining system requirements and creating a completely new user interface that was easy to navigate, while providing access to a wide range of contracting data needed by the users.

New functionality was introduced enhancing contract searchability and giving more in-depth opportunity management to follow, save, and bid on contracts. Greater customization was also built into the system through the addition of an administrative portal allowing USFCR admins to easily toggle on and off user features based on their subscription level.

Greater Salesforce and data source integrations were also introduced to give the platform access to more information, increasing its usability and usefulness.

Through our AWS architecture upgrades, we were able to improve monitoring through CloudWatch and CloudTrail, reduce operating costs by hosting over S3 and using RDS for the storage of operational and transactional data, and provide more secure user management using IAM and Cognito.