Simplified Customer Portal with SAP Fiori

CLIENT

A Class 1 Canadian Railway company.

PROJECT

Simplify an existing customer portal to run on an updated technology platform and improve the customer experience.

RESULTS

Successful roll-out of a Fiori-based user portal to 40 customers on launch, with nearly 3,000 additional customers onboarded in the following six months.

Project Information

A Class 1 Canadian Railway company approached ConvergentIS expressing the need to simplify its customer portal. They had a big challenge in front of them as they needed to update their technology platform and improve their customer’s experience. The kicker: the company managed over ~19,000 users on one technology platform and each customer had its own set of notifications and shipping requirements.

The customer embarked on a design engagement with our Design Thinking and User Experience team to uncover the core challenges and build a workable solution.

The Challenge

Simplifying a customer portal that handles approximately 19,000 users on a single technology platform presented a big challenge. On top of that, each customer had its own set of notifications and shipping requirements. The current system had a confusing, outdated layout. As a result, customers had difficulty finding what they were looking for and often missed items that required action. This resulted in problems for shipping managers and unnecessary delays.

Our client had to find a simple solution to update their technology platform and improve their customers' experience while being able to scale to support future requirements.

The Solution

We hit the ground running and kicked off the design phase. The design team worked with client representatives and their current customers to identify pain points within the current system, along with any elements or features that should be retained in a new portal.

Ultimately, a new design was created that was able to house all customers and make it easy enough for each customer to quickly locate their data, applications, and receive key notifications.

The client was provided with a framework that would be scalable over time and simplified the user experience. The design centered around a universal SAP Fiori homepage, themed for the client, and using customizable components so that all business units could easily locate their shipping information and be alerted when something required immediate action. In addition to the Fiori homepage, three categories of notifications were incorporated to ensure that customers had the right information at their fingertips. This would help them to avoid extra charges if critical actions were missed.

The Results

SEAMLESS ROLL-OUT TO NEARLY 3,000 CUSTOMERS WITHIN 6 MONTHS OF LAUNCH

Our team executed a successful deployment in December and because of the system stability, the client was able to roll it out to 40 large customers immediately. Even better, the customers that received the new system were able to navigate and access their information with little to no help from the client or our support team. Customers could customize their page with a “Super Tile” to put the information that was most relevant to them on their homepage. By developing a deep understanding of the client’s business process, the team was able to help the client design a solution specifically for their business needs.

Since the initial launch, the new portal has been rolled out to another 800 customers in February of the next year and an additional 2,100 customers in May.

What's Next

The client continues the roll-out in a phased approach with very positive adoption from the client’s customers. This project was adopted quickly and efficiently. Customers have found it to be both “modern” and “very simple to use” and they appreciate being able to customize their own homepage. The story does not stop there. The platform itself is available for other organizations with similar customer management workflow situations that require quicker customer action.

"We really wanted to create a solution for our client's customers that would provide them with actions or alerts that were easily visible and a layout that worked for their entire customer base. We also wanted to give them some flexibility so that they could customize their homepage for their own unique needs."

Alissa SylvestreVP User Experience & Design, ConvergentIS

A Blueprint For The Rio Philosophy

What we built for this railway became an important blueprint for Rio’s philosophy.
The problem was universal: thousands of users, inconsistent workflows, fragmented notifications, and no single place to guide people to the right actions.

The solution we designed — a unified entry point, role-specific components, configurable tiles, and a smart notification framework — directly influenced several core elements of Rio today:

1. Unified Entry Point → Rio Intake

The universal Fiori homepage mirrors Rio’s modern intake layer:
one place where every user can start, see what matters, and take action.

2. Flexible Components → Rio Micro-Apps

Those customizable tiles and components evolved into Rio’s micro-app model, where each business unit gets the exact functions they need—without clutter.

3. Notification Framework → Rio Action Center

The three-tier notification system informed Rio’s action center:
priority alerts, intelligent routing, and surfacing critical items before they become problems.

4. Scalable Design → Rio Orchestration Layer

The scalable framework we created by hand is now built natively into Rio’s orchestration engine—configurable, reusable, and designed for growth.

Simplified Customer Portal Experience with SAP Fiori