Overview
This story is about a successful collaboration between the Sirma Solutions team and a well-established retail technology vendor* specialising in global gift card technologies across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Its core services include innovative card solutions for retail and wholesale markets. The technology comprises off-the-shelf, self-managed platforms and fully customized solutions. This capability enables revenue growth and cost efficiencies across a gift card program and within reward, incentive, loyalty, promotion, and discount programs. Sirma’s developers and software specialists worked alongside their UK counterparts as team augmentation partners, helping them to enhance the existing platform and create a seamless user experience for B2C and B2B customers.
Project Scope
Sirma provided ongoing development support, quality assurance (QA), and agile project governance. Our team leveraged a robust technology stack to achieve the project goals, including Angular, JavaScript, Java, Spring, PostgreSQL, and Selenium. Sirma actively contributed to the B2C and B2B development streams, ensuring a unified platform experience.
Main Challenge
The company’s expansion into the B2B market required significant platform adjustments. Sirma was a key partner in extending the existing system to include B2B functionality. This included developing essential services such as warehouse management, file parsing and processing, message routing, and authentication. These services laid the groundwork for API-based modules that automated various B2B operations, such as gift card ordering, payment processing, configuration management, and permission handling.
Tihomir Totev, the CTO of Sirma Solutions, emphasized that “the Sirma team has fully comprehended the project goals and context and has offered skilled software engineers and specialists, as well as excellent working processes. The whole team acted as an augmented workbench for partners’ product development team and was responsible for running the entire development process.”
Delivery
Sirma employed agile practices to ensure continuous delivery of high-value features and functionalities. This iterative approach allowed for constant feedback and adjustments throughout the process. Sirma’s commitment to agile principles resulted in a platform that was not only scalable but also adaptable to the evolving business needs.
Results
This collaboration proved to be a resounding success. A strong foundation of trust was established, expanding the work scope to encompass UI/UX design. Sirma’s expertise in development, QA, and project management proved instrumental in optimizing workflows, enhancing system performance, and resolving real-time production issues.
This successful partnership streamlined the B2B operations and led to faster turnaround times. Notably, the platform’s scalability ensured that the vendor’s core business could continue to grow and adapt to the ever-changing demands of the gift card market. Furthermore, the trust between the two companies led to the expansion of the contract. Sirma’s development team was entrusted with the system UI/UX update, numerous new integrations, and core platform upgrades, solidifying the foundation for future growth. Through this collaboration, the vendor delivered a robust and scalable gift card platform that catered to both B2C and B2B markets, ultimately creating a superior user experience for its customers.
*The company name cannot be revealed under the NDA restrictions.
Photo credits: © Shutterstock
