Vodafone Catapult

The Challenge: Bring product information together

As many large organisations grow and explore new strategies, data and applications often become fragmented and separated across several logical and physical locations. This can lead to conflicting and duplicated data, resulting in confusion for users and possible loss of revenue for the organisation.

Vodafone’s Sales and Marketing Teams were struggling to collate product and pricing information spread across several applications. A clear requirement emerged to rationalise and centrally locate all sales and marketing data into one system. As a current supplier to Vodafone for software development and hosting services, Flowmoco were approached to help with this new project. The resultant application would become ‘Vodafone Catapult’.

The Opportunity

A new sales and marketing roadmap had just been launched
at Vodafone and their employees needed to be briefed and updated with relevant information. For Vodafone to fully succeed with these new objectives, sales product information needed to be easily and quickly accessible in a single online source.

This would initially be required for internal Vodafone employees only, with a later requirement for Vodafone partner companies who would need to access specific product data and have customised security requirements.

This project would be an exciting opportunity to align Vodafone product information systems to the new sales strategy, and Flowmoco were more than happy to help.

Our Approach

The initial consultation phase with Vodafone stakeholders and subject matter experts focused on the business challenges - sepcifcially where the current systems were problematic and inefficient. Management of users and content was identified as a particular challenge.

Following initial workshops clickable prototypes were built, enabling a deeper collective understanding and agreement of the build objectives. which could be used by the development team to build the application. In addition to the prototypes, a SASS framework was specifically built for Vodafone to handle all branding colours, layout and CSS styling.

Once the prototypes were signed off - development of the platform could proceed.

The Result

Flowmoco successfully launched 3 applications for Vodafone internal employees and VPA and ISP Partners.

By making the decision to use a single CMS portal for all 3 Catapult Applications, we simplified the uploading and managing of data. This had the added benefit of reducing the overall project and ongoing hosting costs.

Following the launch, Vodafone’s Sales and Marketing Teams experienced a reduction in errors when communicating product and pricing data to customers, alongside increased efficiencies in locating and collating the data they needed.

Ongoing hosting is provided via AWS, with a robust support and maintenance SLA ensuring the service remains effective and secure.

The Technology

During the consultation phase, we identified content management complexity as a key challenge. To solve this, we implemented the powerful and flexible Wagtail Content Management System (CMS), built on Django. Wagtail's customisability enabled a streamlined editing experience that was highly appreciated by the internal management team.

A major focus was ensuring frictionless authentication to encourage rapid adoption and ease of use for a broad range of users. For external users, we introduced ‘one-time links,’ while internal users benefited from ‘single sign-on’—a balance between usability and security. We also implemented multi-factor authentication for admin logins and customized security policies for partner companies to tightly control access to sensitive content.

Additionally, an email broadcast platform was integrated into the main system via API, enabling Vodafone’s Sales and Marketing teams to send campaign updates directly to their sales teams.