NMMA sheds the anchor of its legacy system Forte Group

National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) is the largest trade association representing boat, marine engine, and accessory manufacturers in the US and Canada. Its platform serves as a single source of record for the organization’s 1,300-member companies that produce over 80 percent of the boats, engines, trailers, and accessories used by boaters in North America.

The association knew its platform, TIMMS, was showing signs of age. NMMA developed a plan to reduce administrative costs and serve its manufacturing customers better. NMMA needed something new. The organization called Forte Group made it happen.

A reinvented web-powered management system

Client:
National Marine Manufacturers
Association (NMMA)

Type of work:
Custom Software Development

Industry:
Technology

Technology and Platforms:
AWS Cloud, SQL, Java, React

Background

The costs of maintaining the NMMA legacy system had outgrown the costs of updating, so the organization decided to act. NMMA took proposals from a dozen software services companies, ultimately selecting Forte.
NMMA and Forte Group agreed that the most cost-effective solution would be to build a new application rather than update the old system.
NMMA had funding to develop a new system but needed a minimum viable product (MVP) to launch by the end of the year — just five months away. With no time to waste, both teams got started.

Results achieved

Forte delivered a working MVP before the engagement’s year-end deadline.
The MVP was so well-received that the NMMA team decided to build additional features into the ECT the following year.
With improved operational capacity and business flexibility, NMMA is now empowered, with modern tools and data, to create an even better experience for the boat manufacturers they serve across the US for years to come
Work began with the first of 10 two-week sprints toward the MVP.
Forte architected and built the application using microservices, and deployed it on AWS using ECS for containerized services, CloudWatch for monitoring, ECR to store docker images, and RDS for the database.

Feature-based challenges:

Ramp up a cross-functional team of product designers, engineers, quality assurance (QA) analysts, and a product owner to kick off delivery

Introduce NMMA to agile software methodologies, and establish a product roadmap.

Ease the administrative burden of NMMA’s staff by automating time-consuming processes

Business challenges:

Ramp up a cross-functional team of product designers, engineers, quality assurance (QA) analysts, and a product owner to kick off delivery

Introduce NMMA to agile software methodologies,
and establish a product roadmap

Ease the administrative burden of NMMA’s staff by automating time-consuming processes

Forte Group adapted to our needs and challenged us to think outside the box by providing various options to improve the end product. Their expertise, product support, and customer service made a smooth transition to the new system. Based on our experience with the Forte team, we would recommend them to any business looking for support.”

Scott Berry
Director of Engineering Standards
at NMMA

Solution highlights

Eased administrative burden:
The new NMMA platform serves as a single source of record for the entire organization. Paper- and email-based systems of record are now digitized
in one central location, making accessing and processing data easier and faster.

The new application’s improved UI/UX: Manufacturers could easily submit data on their boats and accessories. NMMA staff manually copied this data from spreadsheets onto the old platform into their system. The new application’s data flow seamlessly integrates with NMMA’s internal accounting system and customer relationship management (CRM) tool.

The new web-based application:
Engineering Certification Team (ECT), uses the same business logic as the old system but improves workflow and processes through automation, enhanced UI, and increased performance. The platform was built from the ground up on a modular technology stack,
making it easier to scale with added integrations, features, and upgrades in the future.

Digitalized contracting:
The system was built to integrate
with DocuSign, allowing all contracts
to be signed and recorded digitally.

Automated data:
Manual tasks, such as registering SKUs, measurements, and other information, are now submitted by manufacturers and automatically
flow into the NMMA databases.