30% increase in online bookings
30,000 users
360k lines of code
80% bot written
Company: Moreton Island Adventures (MIA)
Product Owner: Liz Hemmens
Location: Brisbane, Australia
The challenge.
Liz Hemmens is the CEO of Moreton Island Adventures and the product owner of the MIA application. It’s a family-owned business and Liz’s mother had built the initial custom booking software 25 years ago. However, like any software system, over time it had become antiquated and needed updating.
As a small business we like to be innovative, that’s why we built our software system back in the 90s and we wanted to get back to that.
Liz engaged WorkingMouse, a software team familiar with Codebots technologies, to scope out and build her solution.
We wanted a custom application that people can book ferries and accommodation online quite easily and we also wanted an app for operational purposes.
She needed an application that could keep up with her big competitors, was agile and adaptable enough to accommodate the innovations she wanted to introduce, was able to communicate with customers for operational reasons, and importantly could also be used as a marketing channel.
The solution.
Moreton Island Adventures (MIA) is a ferry and accommodation booking service which offers trips for its users between the mainland and Moreton island.
Four years ago, we had 68% of our bookings online, we’re up around 98% now.
The streamlined application means there is less need for administrative staff in the booking process. Instead they can now play a different role in the business. Rather than just booking people in, they are focused on marketing to their customers.
We used to arrive two hours prior to a full departure and now it’s an hour – it’s saved us a full hour and we have trained the crew so on weekends we don’t have any admin staff in.
The benefits of building with Codebots is that Liz got exactly what she needed.
The WorkingMouse team were able to work closely with Liz to define the requirements of the application to her business processes and the demand of the market.
Technology
MIA is a mobile responsive web application built using full stack, second generation codebots.
Core functionality
WorkingMouse was able to directly leverage some of the core functionality of Codebots to speed up the delivery of MIA’s project. The CRUD functionality allowed MIA’s admin users complete and flexible data governance controls. In addition, the MIA application is integrated with a number of third party products like booking apps, a CRM, and a payment gateway. It uses the framework that Codebots provides plus custom code to integrate with third party API’s.
Extensions
Codebots extensions are features or components which add common business logic into an app without the need to write code. Essentially, they are cool things the bots can do.
| Extensions | How it was implemented |
|---|---|
| User | This behaviour controls which users and groups can access particular parts of the application. MIA needed users and administrators to have different access to different parts of the application. |
Why Codebots?
Continuous iteration.
How do you build an application that is easy to iterate?
We just want to continue to make it better and basically implement anything that we see that we think is going to be amazing in our business, we have the power to do that.
It’s important that a business chooses a platform that allows them to add new features and continue to iterate in order to maintain their competitive edge.
Codebots’ model-driven software development process creates a tight coupling between code and documentation that allows the MIA code base to be continually iterated through the platform, something that cannot be done when using other scaffolding tools.
Scalable.
How do you build an application that can scale with your business?
Our business has actually increased 30% in the last three months since COVID, and the application’s handled it perfectly.
Codebots is positioned well to help a customer respond to market needs and scale up. Just simply by reconfiguring the entity diagram on the platform, the MIA app can be rebuilt and redeployed based on that new code that’s written.
It’s important to choose technology that is scalable and can grow with the business because you never know what is going happen around the corner.
Customisable.
How can I build a custom app?
Initially we thought we could use off the shelf software, but when we implemented it, it was a disaster! We were desperately searching for a way that we could afford to build the software that we needed. Codebots has been extremely successful for us.
It was important for MIA to have an application that was customised because they had specific business requirements and wanted to get as quick a return on investment as possible.
The development process with Codebots meant faster releases and shorter feedback loops so they could respond to the feedback of users and admin staff and create a more customised product and experience.
– 50 years of business processes have been streamlined into the outstanding MIA booking app, powered by Codebots technology and giving the business confidence to set sail into an unpredictable future. If you have manual business processes that need digitising and would to like explore what’s possible with Codebots let our team show you how in a free online workshop.
Written by Christine Chien
Marketing Operations and Partnerships
Our very own Christine is a marketer by day, nerd by night. If she isn’t developing our marketing strategy, she is usually found by her 3D printer or at a local plant shop.
