Weight Watchers

Leveraged Technologies

Platform Integration

Core Capabilities

We Helped Weight Watchers Manage Their Brand

Utilizing our Microsoft .Net development expertise, Seisan created a web application known as “Prism” to facilitate the approval process for all Weight Watchers brand licensees throughout the world.

Objective

Create a web application that facilitates and ultimately leads to compliance of contractual obligations between Weight Watchers’ brand licensees and corporate office.

Solution

A custom web application that serves as a portal for brand licensees throughout North America and European markets.

For global brands, the effort to ensure that your brand image and message are being represented accurately across the enterprise is no small task. As the world’s leading commercial weight management program, Weight Watchers knows all too well that the trust wellness-seeking individuals place in the company’s weight management programs and food plans is not directly in the hands of the corporate marketing team, but rather is almost entirely dependent upon the experience an individual has with a franchisee. As such, Weight Watchers needed a reliable system capable of linking with its multinational network of franchisees to better ensure that all of the company’s brand requirements were being followed. In working with Weight Watchers’ team, we constructed a custom web application to do just that – to ensure compliance with all business process workflows and legal obligations across the enterprise so that Weight Watchers staff are able to monitor and track all system and franchisee branding activity

Project Overview

When a company is built upon the act of educating its members on how to manage their weight and live healthy lives, the process of ensuring that the global network of franchisees is staying “on brand” is at best tedious (or at worse, a distraction). That’s why Weight Watchers – which manages a slew of products and services ranging from web and mobile applications to retail products and print publications – was so keen to find a way to better equip its licensees with brand materials, as well as provide oversight to ensure proper compliance in their usage.

This project wasn’t our first for Weight Watchers. Our team had previously engaged with the Weight Watchers corporate office to develop several web portals, the success of which earned us the attention of the global licensing department which was interested in bolstering its efforts to ensure the compliance of content in accordance with the Weight Watchers brand guidelines (for things such as product advertising and packaging). Specifically, the goal here was to develop a web portal to help manage the approval workflow and storage of all assets submitted to Weight Watchers by brand licensee partners – a process that was previously done manually and required a high volume of emails sent between Weight Watchers corporate office and licensees. This resulted in an approval process that was riddled with errors and omissions and took nearly two weeks for an approval to be issued.

Our team worked along with project sponsors at Weight Watchers to conceptualize and design a flexible solution that would facilitate communication for licensees across the globe. The resulting system that Seisan designed and built for Weight Watchers was flexible enough that it was expanded to manage approval workflows not only in the United States as was originally intended, but also throughout North America and Europe.

Technology Details

The Weight Watchers Licensing Portal – known internally as Prism – is a responsive web application. The Microsoft .Net platform was selected as the server architecture to align with technology already utilized by Weight Watchers internal information technology team. Seisan developed the responsive web application utilizing C# Microsoft .Net technology along with the Javascript framework. Hosting resources included the creation of secure, RESTful web services to facilitate data being sent to/from mobile devices. Microsoft SQL Server was deployed to securely store a high volume of application data, with Azure storage services to facilitate the storage of other digital assets. In all, the project included user experience design, database architecture and web services

Improved Experience

Seisan also designed an updated corporate solutions ordering website to streamline the experience for licensees.

Ordering Made Easy

Users select a poster or layout of choice and customize overall size, enter text, choose paper and ship directly to approved printers within their area.

Results

The Prism application was an instant success, tightening up an approval process that was quite error-prone and reducing a time-consuming process that previously took two weeks for completion to just three days. Additionally, the entire experience was made more positive by the introduction of user self-help – with the introduction of the Prism system, the Weight Watchers licensing staff reported a nearly 90% reduction in calls regarding approvals.