ModLogix

Please describe your company and your position there.

Bunddler is an e-Commerce platform that helps people shop online in foreign countries as easily, seamlessly, and inexpensively as if they did it within their own country.

This solution relies on a network of “shopping assistants” – small businesses and entrepreneurs in foreign countries that take care of order processing, payments, delivery, customer support, and other related tasks to deliver the goods to the customer.

Our platform provides the tools needed to manage this process - starting from online order processing, payments and order tracking, to customer feedback, custom content authoring, marketing, and advertising.

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

We hired ModLogix to upgrade portions of our old ASP.NET WebForms application to .NET Core MVC+Angular and to build new mobile applications on top of the legacy backend.

The goal of the project was to introduce new services for our users, specifically, applications for iOS and Android platforms. The secondary objective was to start preparing the solution for cloud migration and improve performance.

As our user base reached 500,000 customers with almost 2 million sessions per month, our platform started to exhibit performance issues during peak use times.

How did you select ModLogix and what were the deciding factors?

Modlogix came as a referral to us. What we liked with them is that from the beginning, they dove deep into our business model and worked initially more as business consultants rather than a company that simply executes on our requirements.

By asking tough questions, they made us rethink our approaches to technology and growth strategy for the business. Together with ModLogix, we significantly reworked our initial plans, and not only implemented the original scope of work but also positioned our company to succeed in the near future.

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

Our application was a 10-year-old ASP.NET WebForms, with SQL Server 2008 on the backend. We started our business as a startup, and it often happens, the architecture was never the #1 priority in the beginning.

But you have to pay for this sooner or later. Honestly, we were very fearful about starting application modernization. Folks from Modlogix proposed a solution where we could proceed with the upgrade gradually.

They first built for us new a level of microservices using .NET Core 3.1. Those microservices still use old SQL server backend with a monolith database, but this can be upgraded later.

Then they developed iOS and Android applications. The next step is to start rebuilding the frontend using Angular utilizing the microservices developed earlier.

In addition to this, a lot of performance improvements were made to the data layer, achieving significant performance improvements in the most critical and heavily utilized portions of the solution.

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

There was UX specialist, two backend developers, two frontend developers, QA and a part-time project manager.

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

With this product update, we improved our position in a very competitive market. Our customers appreciate the new mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms.

We are now able to sustain a much higher load on our infrastructure and save costs by shutting down underutilized resources during the slow periods.

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

We used SCRUM and had transparent and effective communications with ModLogix team.

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

Deep understanding of customer needs and a desire to go above and beyond the technical requirements to analyze the reasons for each request, and recommend more effective ways to achieve the business objectives.

We were also very pleased with the level of their engineering staff – we received top-notch advice, and the quality of their work was outstanding.

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

As most of the resources allocated to our project were located offshore (Ukraine), and we have a 7hrs time difference, it was not initially convenient at times.

For example, if you want to discuss something with a UX person after lunch, you realize that it is already 10pm in Ukraine, and the discussion gets shifted to the next day.

But after a short while, we adapted to it. We started our days 1hr earlier, and this helped some of our team members to increase productivity. While ModLogix also has staff onshore, we never had a problem reaching them when we needed something.

By utilizing the combined US/Ukraine model, we were able to achieve more than we expected while remaining within the budget allocated to this project.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Approved Admissions is a cloud-based eligibility verification platform that monitors and reports changes in Medicare, Medicaid, and HMO payers. We help healthcare organizations avoid billing errors providing relevant information about patients' eligibility. As a business development manager, I am responsible for bringing new business into the organization, managing customer relationships, and identifying potential competitive advantages. The initiative to update to .NET Core allowed us to scale up our platform, and consequently reduce the per-transaction cost.

For what projects/services did your company hire ModLogix?

Approved Admissions hired ModLogix for a core technology upgrade project. Their developers moved our application from MVC to .NET Core 3.1. During this process, they also introduced a lot of improvements and optimizations to the platform code, which allowed us to decrease per-transaction costs 3x and have the ability to scale up the system easily.

What were your goals for this project?

We had two primary goals: improve the performance of the platform – due to our growth, the code written five years ago started to show its limitations; and reduce the per-transaction cost. Our secondary goals were to improve the horizontal scalability and internal security of the platform. All objectives were met, and then some. ModLogix team came through in a big way – not only did they deliver all of the functionality we asked for, but as a bonus, they have also re-engineered and upgraded to .NET Core a portion of our platform used for connectivity to external sources of data which was not in the initial scope.

How did you select this vendor?

ModLogix is a spin-off from Langate Corp (www.langate.com) – a company that helped us start building our platform about five years ago. It was a very successful engagement, so we decided to return to the vendor we already had a positive experience working with, and they directed us to Modlogix. Originally Langate was chosen for its expertise in the Healthcare domain.

Describe the project and the services they provided in detail.

ModLogix team upgraded our core application to .NET Core 3.1. This included updates of our portal, change to MSMQ to improve performance, database optimizations, and migration of live environment to the new platform. Along the way, their team had to re-write some of the modules from scratch because the tools used for MVC didn't have direct equivalents in .NET Core. The whole migration process was seamless from our point of view – the Modlogix team kept us up to date during all phases of the project, and everything was completed slightly faster than original estimates. They've even gone above and beyond the agreed-upon scope of the project, and upgraded to .NET Core our communication modules at no additional charge

What was the team composition?

There were three developers, one quality assurance engineer, technical lead, and a project manager.

Can you share any information that demonstrates the impact that this project has had on your business?

Though these changes are not apparent to our clients, modernization made our product far better. We were able to reduce our per-transaction cost by more than 300% and exponentially increase performance – our platform now supports horizontal scaling and the ability to add processing nodes ad-hoc on an as-needed basis. It is also more secure and stable than before. We expect a positive ROI as a direct result of this project within the next six months.

How was project management arranged and how effective was it?

The team used Microsoft DevOps, so all the tasks and their statuses were fully transparent for us. As for communication and terms, we hadn't any issues. The team was very responsive and kept us up-to-date on all changes and progress. The project was completed slightly faster than initially estimated and within budget.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

Being subject matter experts in Healthcare, they really understood our challenges and we didn't have to spend hours explaining what we needed. We liked the level of communications, transparency, and a desire to go above and beyond the contract to get the job done.

Are there any areas for improvement?

I can't think of anything at the moment.