Appsmart

Please describe your company and your position there.

Regional Manager SEE for Glovo, a company present in 23 counties.

For what projects/services did your company hire Appsmart, and what were your goals?

We needed a Middleware to integrate with our systems, and the restaurants systems with the purpose of integrating with our partners as seamless and cost effective as possible

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We had multiple offers, but we found AppSmart the best for us, not so much as cost, but as a very strong team they had, and a very good software solution they proposed.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Appsmart team developed an integration layer to transfer in real time, orders between Glovo backend API and our partners’ POS software solutions in Romania. After studying our API documentation and some major software solutions used by our partners, they first had to deliver an architecture design of the proposed solution. Their proposal included top technologies and we were impressed that they treated very seriously aspects like redundancy, uptime, speed of transfer, avoiding data loss and audit of operations.

The implementation was fast and we managed to integrate the first partners in record time. After the pilot integrations, we had two more iterations in order to reduce as much as possible the effort spent to accommodate new partners’ solutions. After achieving the desired improvements, they also provided a thorough documentation to help partners in the integration process. The project was coded in Java, using Spring framework, with MySQL database. For streams we used Redis from AWS. The solution was deployed in docker using Amazon ECS.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

The team included 4 people, the project manager who acted also as a business analyst, the solution architect and 2 developers – mid and senior. We interacted mostly with the business analyst and the solution architect.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

By connecting our backend API with the partners’ POS software solutions, we send orders coming from Glovo to the systems the restaurants use to manage all their activity. This integration had a huge impact in our partnerships with restaurants because we both save a lot of time and avoid a lot of errors with these automations.

The number of faulty orders that reached our call center decreased considerably after this integration. The project went so well, that we extended the collaboration for further developments and maintenance of the current solution and also providing this integration layer with POS software solutions for our partners in other countries.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We communicated very well with Appsmart team, and this was also the impression they left to our partners’ teams they got in contact with. We worked agile, in multiple iterations, with well-defined deliverables for each stage. Even if it was a complicated project, with multiple teams from partners involved, we managed to meet the deadlines in the proposed timeline.

They announced every potential risk or delay in time and we worked together very well to pass the challenges that occurred. They were very involved and realized from the very beginning the importance of the project. We communicated by email, phone, Slack and Google Meet.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The combination between impressive technical skills in state-of-art-technologies and software architecture and excellent communication skills, project engagement and rapid understanding of the business.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing worth mentioning.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Global Brother srl is a leading company in the direct response marketing niche . I am the CFO of Global Brother srl. I am also part of the operations management board, that's why I took in the responsibility of implementing a brand new OMS platform.

For what projects/services did your company hire Appsmart, and what were your goals?

We were looking for a development team to design and develop an Order Management System. Our goals were to automatize the entire process am make it traceable, from receiving orders from digital marketing platforms to fulfilling them through our logistics partners. We also needed an interface where we would easily search through all our orders and have them linked to their deliveries, to help our support department in their activity

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We were convinced by their experience in developing solutions for parcel delivery companies and integrating with API’s from digital marketing platforms.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

Appsmart team had to design and implement an OMS that would integrate with both our selling channels APIs, Clickbank and Digistore24, to automatically receive orders and then transfer orders details to our three logistics partners that handle order fulfillment by integrating with their APIs.

They also had to integrate with Active Campaign and Facebook and develop user interfaces to present and search through data: orders, shipments, AWB, support tickets and so on. They first delivered a system architecture proposal, then we proceed with the integration with Clickbank API and developed the screens to list and search orders. Afterwards they integrated with the first logistic partner API.

We wanted to pilot a first end to end flow, from receiving an order to the delivery process. Then we added all others and did the marketing integrations in the end. Regarding the technologies, Appsmart used Elasticsearch to index orders and MySQL for the rest of the data. The App is developed in Laravel.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked with 5 people, one business analyst and a development team of 4 members. We mostly interacted with the business analyst and the technical lead who was also the system architect.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

With the OMS developed by Appsmart we automatized a process that in the past required much effort and attention. We had to work in multiple platforms, manually export and import data that was getting bigger and bigger every day and it was very difficult to offer support to our customers because we did not have a centralized view of the business.

Now we have an integrated ecosystem with a central platform, everything happens in time and follows a well-defined schedule - we have error checks, data validation procedures, alerts, notifications and retry mechanisms. Our support department has a powerful and fast tool to help them satisfy our customers’ demands. Appsmart designed an easy to scale system

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

We followed the project plan and worked in sprints. Appsmart team met all major deadlines in the project plan. We were impressed by how fast they understood our business needs and the quality of their proposed solution.

We benefited from their previous experience with similar projects and they helped us a lot in defining the requirements of the OMS. Everybody in the team was very open and proactive and we enjoyed that. We had nice debates and brainstorming sessions. We communicated using Skype, email and by phone.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The team is young, it has implemented lots of major projects and is capable to easily understand business needs and design solutions that significantly improve the processes within an organization. They live to be challenged.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

Nothing comes to my mind.