Delivering Digital Innovation for Delta Faucet Company

On June 24, CleanSlate partnered with Delta Faucet Company to present a keynote at the virtual Gartner Evanta CIO event to a select audience of C-level executives in IT. 

The title of the presentation was “Delivering Digital Innovation from The Ground Up” and, at a high level, told the amazing journey that CleanSlate helped Delta Faucet to take to implement an Agile delivery platform that enables digital applications to be delivered with higher velocity, quality and predictability. 

What follows is a synopsis of the presentation, which can be (freely) viewed here:  Gartner Evanta CIO Presentation

Digital Transformation  

Over the last decade, the market has experienced unprecedented change. There are digital offerings for everything, like banking, grocery shopping, real estate, gambling, and even doctor visits.  There is a global marketplace available for everyone, making it easy for two kids in a garage to start and grow a thriving business.  Most notably, there is an ever-increasing acceleration in the advancement of certain technologies, like cloud, big data, mobile, social media, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the “Internet of Things” (or IoT).   

A very visible example of this is to look at the advancement of social media platforms since the introduction of MySpace back in 2003: 

Product Innovation at Delta Faucet

Delta Faucet Company is an extremely powerful brand name, known for their history in providing innovative faucet technology.

One of their first and most innovative products, launched in 1958, was a faucet containing a unique ball valve which enabled it to have a single handle.  Up until that point, faucets were only available with two handles.

When the researchers at Delta looked at future trends, they found that the residential market for digital faucets is projected to grow by a whopping $1.8B by the year 2024!  Some of the drivers are an increase in home remodeling projects, new construction, advances in connected home technology (think Alexa or Google), and higher consumer demand.  The researchers predict a move from a traditional faucet to more personalized water experiences that incorporates digital technology at its core.

Building the Digital Platform

Despite Delta’s long history of product innovation, they were very new at incorporating digital innovations into their product lines. 

They defined many goals when considering a digital product delivery system, such as customer centricity, speed-to-market, operational excellence, and security, to name a few.

It became clear early on that Agile-based processes were going to be the best fit to achieve these goals.

Delta and CleanSlate partnered together to implement product delivery capabilities leveraging modern Agile delivery processes and “best fit” tooling. 

Specifically, CleanSlate helped define a strategy that included people, process, and technology that addressed Delta’s goals for a digital product delivery system.

Impressive Results (so far!)

Since inception, this new digital product delivery system has helped Delta improve quality, accelerate delivery, and improve reliability.

Specifically, under the mantra of “catch issues early, deliver faster, recover quickly”, Delta has been able to

  • reduce release cycle times from 6 weeks to 1 hour,
  • increase unit testing code coverage from 10% to 90%, and
  • support a no touch build & deploy process, among other impressive results.

CleanSlate can help your company achieve very similar results – contact us to learn more.