Look into an association's remarkable transformation, revealing how they embraced innovation to ensure their standards remain accessible and valuable in a tech-driven world.
For over a century, the ASTM has been a cornerstone of global industry, setting standards across a vast array of sectors. With over 30,000 members and a portfolio of 12,900 standards impacting everything from construction materials to everyday plastics, the association's influence is undeniable. However, in the face of a rapidly digitizing world, the association faced a critical decision: cling to its traditional methods or embrace innovation to remain relevant. This case study explores how ASTM embarked on a journey to transform its business model for the digital age, ensuring its standards remained accessible and valuable in a tech-driven landscape.
The Challenge: Legacy Systems Impeded Digital Transformation at ASTM International
ASTM’s mission focuses on establishing standards and providing training, certifications, and hosting educational events for engineers worldwide. However, their legacy database, burdened by 30 years of patches and inadequate upgrades, made it difficult for members to access information, created data management bottlenecks, and led to duplicate efforts with internal teams. Additionally, poor integration between internal and external systems and a lack of clear documentation on system interactions compounded these problems. To address these issues, ASTM needed a comprehensive blueprint for sustainable growth.
The Solution: Technology Roadmap and A Digital Transformation Catalyst
Our team began by inventorying ASTM’s digital ecosystem, examining the current systems, users, and dependent processes. We mapped out how data flows in and out of the business, identified which systems communicate with each other, and aligned these insights with ASTM's business goals for system integration. With over a dozen industries and tens of thousands of standards to manage, maintaining various digital touchpoints—from the general ledger to the publication shipping system—was crucial.
During our assessment, we identified a key opportunity: leveraging an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). This would allow ASTM to utilize APIs from various systems, creating a streamlined information highway that ensures accurate data delivery and identifies which platforms should be sources of truth.
With the solution architecture taking shape, Icreon’s global strategy team and ASTM technology leaders defined the future digital ecosystem, resulting in the creation of the Real-Time Data Exchange (RTDX). RTDX connects systems, messages, and alerts across all ASTM digital properties and is designed for scalability. Built on Azure cloud, RTDX can easily integrate new properties and scale on-demand, ensuring seamless data flow across ASTM's systems.
The Result: 30% Membership Growth, 20% Revenue Increase
Since launching the RTDX platform, ASTM International has achieved a 4x decrease in platform integration time, a 30% growth in membership, and a 20% increase in revenue. The scalable RTDX applications and data seamlessly supporting future business needs and driving efficiency and growth.
Parallel to the RTDX development, Icreon conducted a strategic maintenance discovery phase. This allowed the team to thoroughly understand the existing systems, identify critical areas for improvement, and iteratively integrate these findings into RTDX using an agile model. With constant upgrades and support, we modernized legacy systems without disrupting member services critical to the organization functioning, thereby, enhancing the overall user experience and operational efficiency.
The Challenge: Outdated Applications Undermine Member & Committee Experience
ASTM also struggled with cumbersome sign-up processes and inefficient internal applications leading them to undertake a digital transformation project to create a modern and engaging experience for both members and staff that could foster brand loyalty and improve overall satisfaction for both members and staff.
The Solution: Redefining Customer Experience with Data-Driven UX and Advanced Digital Tools
To redefine ASTM's customer experience, Icreon collaborated with the organization to establish a truly member-centric approach. Before building a new member digital experience, we focused on understanding different stakeholders’ needs to ensure every new feature delivered maximum value. We mapped member and staff journeys, capturing in-person feedback to create genuine personas and accurate workflows for digital experience.
We prioritized migrating data from local servers and partner DMS committees known as committee operations warehouse to cloud-based infrastructure, enhancing security and accessibility while mitigating risks. This ensured immediate updates across all ASTM systems, facilitating seamless data flow between internal and external applications.
By evaluating implicit data from customer interactions, we engineered intuitive experiences. ASTM members rely on tools to ideate, collaborate, vote, and learn about new standards. We analyzed each touchpoint to redesign tools and platforms, enhancing connections within professional standards networks.
For the staff members (internal applications), we implemented role and permissions-based personalization in the applications, empowering users to manage multiple activities seamlessly. We built a suite of applications for member management, committees management, document management system, reporting, membership renewal etc.
For ASTM members, we developed intuitive applications to enhance their experience. Web onboarding forms for 4 different membership types (student, informational, participating, and organizational) to simplify the membership process. These apps help different members create ballot items, conduct the voting process, empower staff to manage member classification and voting rights in committees, etc. One of the crucial implementations as part of the solution was done with the Meetings App, powered by Aventri and RPA. This intelligent event management application enables seamless scheduling and management of committee events like creating agendas, downloading meeting materials, and accessing schedules for committee meetings.
These applications collectively enhance the member experience, staff & committee experience, promoting engagement, accessibility, and efficiency within the ASTM community.
The Result: Increased staff productivity with Automated Onboarding, Renewals, and Real-Time Updates
ASTM experienced significant improvements across multiple levels of transformation. The newly responsive and scalable suites of applications allow seamless addition of new features without disrupting existing infrastructure. Migrating all data and documents to the cloud has enhanced security and accessibility.
Icreon’s solutions ultimately streamlined staff experiences, enabling efficient data uploading, sharing, and access control. Membership management has been transformed, allowing new members to board within minutes and providing real-time information updates. Customers now enjoy instant access to ASTM products, and membership renewals or cancellations are processed swiftly and accurately. ASTM has seen a 30% growth in membership and a 20% increase in revenue since partnering with Icreon.
New technology initiatives within the organization often ended up in siloes and didn’t work harmoniously. Icreon enabled the organization to think about technology more holistically and as a critical investment in business opportunity, tying the needs of the business today to a 10-year roadmap for long-term strategy without tech debt.
Icreon started with analyzing the current data flow and integration of systems within the organization. Considering the system flaws, the team defined a process for IT leadership to make decisions quickly about technology investments, while being able to take a long-term view on them.
ASTM was utilizing a 30-year-old technology that required complete replacement. The Icreon team presented a blueprint for integrating various business systems designed to flex and bend, so to speak – so that new technology could seamlessly fit alongside it. The introduction of a custom software development for database management and system integration within the organization led to a tremendous business model innovation.
Icreon recommended overall RTDX concept, architecture, and design. RTDX or real-time data exchange platform is built on the Microsoft Azure technology stack. This platform can manage data with accuracy while interacting with internal and external systems seamlessly.
ASTM lacked agile technology adoption in its legacy application lifecycles. Thus, along with a new data exchange platform for ASTM, the team assisted the organization with strategic planning for improving and modernizing a dozen applications of the existing technology stack to improve the current member experience.
Icreon optimized various business processes and automated manual tasks like member onboarding, membership renewals, and so on with robotic process automation. While implementing the solutions, the team aimed to make ASTM operations and system more profitable, scalable, and resilient.
ASTM was scheduling many member events for product collaboration, and balloting for new standard introductions and updates. To streamline the occurrence of the events and keep minutes of meetings accessible, Aventri integration was done. Icreon didn’t only perform 3rd party integration in the ASTM business model but also streamlined the existing integrations for real-time data updates in the member’s app interface.
Cloud computing is a major driving force for technological innovation and growth in almost every industry. Icreon team has extensive experience migrating data and applications across various platforms. For ASTM International, the team opted for AWS (Amazon Web Services) for migrating and storing documents and other 3rd party information for easy access and governance.
For ASTM International, Icreon introduced a custom personalization approach to streamline staff experiences. It covered role and permission-based personalization for staff to perform various tasks like controlling data visibility, giving, or restricting permissions to different users. Also, the staff members could see information in a real-time environment for better decision making.
Icreon offered a tailored user experience for ASTM members and staff members. The team analyzed and understood the core needs of the organization and delivered a responsive design to meet the given metrics. Now the system is more efficient and faster with a user-friendly interface and features.
Icreon took a customer-first approach to product and service design. Ensuring that each decision communicated the ASTM value. Working together with direct customers and customer ambassadors to build products that could be used by the business to run their operations, but more importantly, build them in such a way that ASTM can repurpose those tools to then sell to their customers vis-à-vis the SaaS model.
