Cool Roof Product Rating Portal

A portal to manage the roofing product rating and certification process.

CRRC Application Form

What

The CRRC needed a user-friendly Portal to help them gather testing results for roofing products, rate products, and handle licensing fees.

Who

Hundreds of companies in the roofing/construction industry rely on the CRRC to receive a rating for their products.

Why

Product applications were previously handled through paper forms rather than a CMS. Payments were done via checks and wire transfers.

How Big

Evaluation and certification affect thousands of products in the construction business. Millions of dollars are at stake when testing, documenting, and rating products.

Our Role

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.

Neato!

The Laravel framework we built allows our client to control the data validation process, reduces the manual entry of data, and generates documents automatically.

From paper to digital

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.

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Laravel development

A close-to-the-metal, fully customized experience

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.

A portal with many roles

In addition to accepting product rating applications and their related test data, the Portal needed to cover a wide range of functionality, such as:

  • Guide CRRC administrators in their workflow to validate product applications, with some automation based on certain events while leaving some flexibility for human administrators to make modifications.
  • Submit product data to ENERGY STARĀ® when ready
  • Provide product data for an API used in CRRC's online directory of products
  • Produce PDF ratings and certification for products that pass validation
  • Accept payments for product applications by credit card, cheque, or other offline payment methods
  • Handle yearly membership renewals, including sending emails to the Portal's members and handling payments
  • Send invoice and payment information to CRRC's accounting software (Quickbooks Online)
  • Create internal reports as spreadsheets

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.

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The team

Constant communication is always key

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.