The CRRC needed a user-friendly Portal to help them gather testing results for roofing products, rate products, and handle licensing fees.
Hundreds of companies in the roofing/construction industry rely on the CRRC to receive a rating for their products.
Product applications were previously handled through paper forms rather than a CMS. Payments were done via checks and wire transfers.
Evaluation and certification affect thousands of products in the construction business. Millions of dollars are at stake when testing, documenting, and rating products.
Solspace built a custom Laravel framework-powered portal to enable licensees to apply for product rating, process credit card payments, and create certificate PDFs. We also ensured that invoicing data was sent directly to CRRC's internal accounting software.
The Laravel framework we built allows our client to control the data validation process, reduces the manual entry of data, and generates documents automatically.
The Cool Roof Rating Council (CRRC) had been processing roofing product applications, including testing and ratings, for many years. However, data was often written on paper documents, sometimes handwritten, with a small fraction of that data then copied to simple fields in a Content Management System.
They needed a unified system in the form of a portal to allow Licensees, who apply for a rating of their products, to enter their data. CRRC administrators needed a more systematic way to allow Licensees to apply for product ratings, allow independent test labs to submit test results, and allow CRRC administrators to oversee the whole process and accurately invoice companies.
The application workflow was a clear yet complex process, requiring the verification of a number of data points before validating the completed application. Solspace needed a way to develop a portal with maximum flexibility while avoiding friction from software that uses its own nomenclature and development approach.
The Laravel framework was a perfect fit for this and allowed us to develop a portal with maximum flexibility while keeping the technical jargon to a minimum. Instead of discussing sections, channels, entries, custom fields, etc., the CRRC and Solspace could mostly communicate in CRRC's terms: applications, statuses, products, licensees, initial test data, aged test data, invoices, payments, etc.
In addition to accepting product rating applications and their related test data, the Portal needed to cover a wide range of functionality, such as:
There is no doubt that Laravel, combined with Solspace's experience in developing portals and API integrations, was a perfect match to cover all of CRRC's needs.
Solspace kept consistent contact with CRRC during the initial preparation, development, and post-launch phases of the portal project. We helped them with bug fixes, tweaks, and new features. Solspace also offered alternative approaches to challenges and took time to discuss the best approach to resolve particular issues. CRRC knew that Solspace had their back, and Solspace maintained a focus on client success.
