Case Story – LEW Lechwerke: Strong Support on the Home Stretch

The Client

LEW Lechwerke is an energy service provider located in Augsburg, Bavaria. It continuously provides nearly one million inhabitants in an area of ​​almost 7,000 square kilometres (2,700 square miles) with electricity. The company, which is one of the leading Bavarian suppliers of energy from hydropower, employs more than 1,700 people.

© Lechwerke AG

Being a wholly owned subsidiary, LEW Consulting is responsible for everything regarding IT in the LEW group. When time quickly ran out on a project – namely, developing an Umbraco-based information platform for customers –, LEW Consulting turned to byte5 for support. The strong cooperation was doubly successful: the project itself was a tremendous success as well as it was finished within a brief period of time.

The Highlights

The Challenges

An Umbraco-cased information portal, designed specifically for the needs of customers and filled with a variety of useful features – this LEW project had come to a halt. The company had to realise that it would be virtually impossible to finish this project in time with the prevalent course of action. The company developers were stuck in other projects, the deadline was fast approaching and the internal customer was waiting for results. Only a few weeks were left to the fixed date. Thus, LEW started its quest for a fitting partner who would be able to support the project specifically with its expertise. Their search did not take long: LEW found byte5, Germany’s only Umbraco Gold Partner.

The next task which needed to be tackled – now with joint forces – was the intensive training of the five LEW developers hosted by byte5. The Umbraco workshop smoothed the way for the information portal’s quick implementation. As a partner team had now been established which was well-informed on both the project and Umbraco in terms of content and technology, it was now time to catch up on the missed time and finish the project successfully and on schedule.

The Solution

With only eight weeks to the deadline, LEW and byte5 clearly defined the demands on the new information platform. To this end, Chris Köhler (COO) set a teleconference: “I was on the phone with eight people for two hours and tried to solve problems on the fly with my expert knowledge. The objective was to work out a concept and features relevant for customers – always with the time pressure in the back of our minds.” Since Umbraco is a CMS which is characterised by its versatility and therefore easily adapts to individual requirements, many obstacles could be overcome quickly. The concrete requirements LEW had met the expertise byte5 offered, so the project was brought to a successful end in a partly agile process.

The Result

And the result is respectable: For customers, the new partner platform means an enormous added value as they can directly carry out their requests on their own. The LEW employees enjoy working with Umbraco just as much. So much that LEW plans on using it again in the future. byte5’s well-mapped out course of action convinced the LEW management and is not least due to the fantastic cooperation between both partners – which will most certainly not have been the last.