Vantino

During the last year, Schilliger has been redesigning its website to provide better information and additional services to its customers online. Schiliger's marketing team in particular needed more flexibility to create Web content, one of the goal being to give a better visibility to the rich catalog of the company.

Vantino has developed the website based on Django and Django-CMS. Our team has worked to integrate the new website smoothly within the company workflows, and to connect it with the existing ERP. Thanks to the CMS, Schilliger's team can now easily manage the content to provide more information to its customers, and the online catalog is regularly and progressively extended with new products.

FFU Marketing and Vantino recently agreed to cooperate for developing their new Web platform. FFU Marketing is an exclusive subsidiary which is in charge of the commercial and marketing activities of the Football Federation of Ukraine (FFU). Vantino has already designed a new landing page capturing potential leads, and developed a new CMS for managing efficiently the content of FFU Marketing website.

Next steps of FFU Marketing digital strategy include the development of the following modules for their new web platform:

• comprehensive presentation website
• fan club
• online store
• FRM solution (i.e., CRM in the parlance of the football industry)

The primary goal of the new Web platform is to increase the online visibility and bring new revenue channels to FFU brand and its sub-brands. The developments are thus geared in priority toward the following aspects:

• Creation of a Web platform for increasing the audience coverage and engagement, as well as for promoting FFU brands and its sub-brands.
• Development of an online store for selling branded goods.
• Integration of CRM tools for managing the client database.

• Vantino team has selected cutting-edge technologies to build in a productive way the new Web platform for FFU Marketing, and follows an agile approach to maximize the added-value and quality of the new functionalities being developed.

As a software development company, Vantino turns ideas into full-featured Web and mobile applications. Our most recent deliverable is Project P – a geo-based social network that is now in the alpha phase. The idea behind the project is to create a platform where members can follow specific geographic locations and be in the loop of all posts tagged there: news, reviews, ads, photos, etc. Therefore, the focus from personal brands (like in the majority of social networks) is shifted towards locations, which become the primary interest of platform’s members. The number of posts generated in a particular spot defines its popularity.

Since making a social network is a tedious and complex process, Vantino team applied not only agile methodology to reach measurable results fast but also used customizable open-source code to save time and reduce the project’s cost for the client. For instance, the cross-native mobile application was built with Flutter – a brand new open-source framework from Google designed to align the development of iOS and Android apps.

The optimal way to deliver such a sophisticated and large-scale platform is to implement the microservice architecture. Here is a set of technologies we used:

• RESTful API
• Spring Framework
• Flutter Google framework
• Solr & Sevtin search engines for the full-text indexing
• Apache Spark for the real-time analysis of events
• Google Cloud Pub/Sub for messaging and communication between distributed services
• PostgreSQL and Redis databases
• Keycloak IAM (Identity and Access Management) server for authentication and authorization
• Cloud-based virtual machines for hosting
• Microservice architecture ensures better reliance, scalability, faster response speed and prevents system overload.

Vantino team’s adherence to best practices greatly helps in undertaking startup projects with customers, who do not have software engineering experience themselves but have concepts of great products.

Idea

Our client is an accounting company which has three office branches in Europe. Their drive for efficient management and readiness to integrate digital tools into their business processes created good grounds for business growth. The company recently decided to bring together some of its internal data in order to get an overview of the company activities in real-time, and to use these insights to better drive the everyday decision-making process.

Challenges

The custom Business Intelligence service to be developed had to be flexible enough to:

• accept various data sources in CSV format;
• provide a secured Web-based dashboard;
• allow non-specialists to generate reports and query the data easily;
• make it possible to integrate generated reports with third-party Web-based user interfaces.

Solution

Based on these needs, Vantino developed a custom and flexible data analytics solution. It is based on the Superset business intelligence (BI) platform which was initially released by Airbnb.

A custom secure REST API allows to upload various sources of CSV data that are automatically exported from the company ERP and then imported to the analytics server database.

Analytics reports are continuously updated which allows the management team to follow the company activities in real-time from a centralized Web interface. These reports may include for example sales monitoring, staff workload, marketing activities and much more. They are organized in different dashboards where information is displayed in a clear and structured way.

The fact that we went for a solution based on open-source technologies makes our customer less dependent on uncontrolled changes, provides a solution specifically tailored for its needs, does not require the payment of recurrent fees, offers more control over its data, and is potentially more secure as compared to depending on proprietary or Saas solutions.

Our client is an accounting and HR management company, which decided to develop a Web platform to automate as many internal processes as possible — petty cash routine, accounting reports, payment operations, invoice and receipt scanning, HR documents and different workflows. The company also wanted to get a global view of customers’ activities and all information to be collected in one place.

Challenges

In the very beginning, the clients considered using external online services, but they had so many specific operations and workflows that it was not possible to find a set of services meeting their needs. The fact that Swiss laws vary from one canton to the other was one more reason to consider a custom Web platform.

Another challenge was to make the platform work not only for employees but for customers as well and to provide them with a flexible and easy-to-use platform.

Solution

The system was developed on the open-source Symfony 4 framework, which is one of the best PHP frameworks currently available. We connected the platform to various third-party APIs and Saas products, including Tableau (analytics software), Ogone (payment service), M-Files (document management) and Xtracta (data entry software). Also, our team connected the Web platform to various banking systems and ensured it was well protected.

A scanning mobile app was another solution provided by our full-stack web development team. It was customized to allow end-users to upload scanned bills from smartphones to the system. The app used Xtracta API to enable optical character recognition (OCR) and extract relevant information from receipts and bills automatically. The interface was designed carefully in order to create a great user experience. For those who were new to the ERP system — an interactive tutorial would be enabled.

In terms of management, we used Agile methodology that allowed us to deliver a quality product in time within the allocated budget.

https://vantino.com/company/blog