Press Release
School Specialty Visualizes eCommerce Portal with iRise
Enhancements to business critical application delivered early with almost no change orders
EL SEGUNDO, CA — March 21, 2011 - iRise®, the global leader in enterprise visualization solutions today announced that School Specialty (NASDAQ: SCHS), a leading education company that provides innovative and proprietary products, programs and services to help educators engage and inspire students of all ages and abilities to learn, utilized iRise to design and deploy improvements to its website, an Oracle-based eCommerce portal that enables customers to browse and purchase products online. By visualizing the enhancements before building, School Specialty was able to deliver the new portal functionality with very limited change orders.
"Visualizing software before it's built simply makes sense as a strategy to cut cost and accelerate new systems delivery," stated Bob Grawien, CIO at School Specialty. "We have seen first-hand the change that visualization can bring to our organization. We're now integrating visualization as a standard practice into our web application development."
Traditionally, business analysts at School Specialty used text based requirements documents, use case diagrams and static screen mock-ups to capture business needs. Stakeholders are then forced to interpret these artifacts and imagine how the live system would look and behave, which could lead to long requirements cycles and expensive change orders.
"We needed to give our users a way to fully interact with proposed solutions early in the life cycle of a project so we can fail early with low cost," continued Mr. Grawien.
With iRise, business analysts at School Specialty are able to quickly assemble working previews of solutions like the eCommerce portal in a matter of hours that exactly mimic the look, feel and behavior of a proposed system, cutting confusion and accelerating requirements cycle times.
"The people responsible for approving our web application design really appreciate the ability to see the changes" continued Mr. Grawien. "Everyone prefers to test drive enhancements and new capabilities versus just reading a text description."
"Driving eCommerce initiatives to market quickly is critical to businesses like School Specialty," said Mitch Bishop, CMO for iRise. "Enterprise visualization is a powerful strategy to get competitive advantage to market faster and drive an innovation agenda."
Enterprise Visualization — Accelerate Business Transformation
Enterprise visualization software from iRise gives business and IT leaders a powerful way to "move the needle" and cost-effectively drive change in their organizations. iRise is the only enterprise grade, real-time collaborative software definition platform on the market today. By enabling global organizations to "test drive" and fully experience critical business systems early in the process, iRise is now an essential strategy to modernize their systems, consolidate applications, cut cost, accelerate delivery and leverage global sourcing partnerships without the usual confusion and risk.
With thousands of projects completed successfully, the value of visualization has proven to be enormous for businesses in highly competitive markets:
- Get to market twice as fast;
- Eliminate 30% of project cost;
- Ensure success of global sourcing strategies; and,
- Dramatically improve customer experience
About iRise
iRise is the world's leading provider of enterprise visualization software for business applications. Visualization has become a critical competitive advantage for businesses to more effectively communicate their needs to technology teams and give everyone involved the ability to interact with and fully experience applications before they are built. Companies of all sizes like General Motors, UPS, FedEx, BP, Haworth, Manpower, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and many others use iRise to "test drive" their applications before building, which accelerates time to market, improves customer experience, and drives cost down. At iRise, we believe that by 2020, all business software will be visualized before being built, the same way that every car, airplane, and building is visualized today. Headquartered in El Segundo, Calif., iRise is backed by Morgan Stanley Venture Partners, and Deutsche Bank, and has sales offices across North America and in London.
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iRise is a registered trademark of iRise. All other companies and products mentioned are trademarks and property of their respective owners.
