Haynes & Company

The client company provides services for collecting and processing various data in the retail market to conduct research in the consumer investment sector.

With an established network of field staff (vendors), the company gathers data on market players, their points of sale, product assortments, and more across the entire United States. A team of managers and analysts oversees data collection, processes the information, and delivers insights to end clients.

This type of complex business, with a highly distributed team, requires automation and digitalization of many critical business processes, such as vendor management, data collection oversight, and initial data processing.

The client initially attempted to address these challenges internally at the start of their business, without a well-thought-out architecture or proper development quality assurance.

As a result, by the time they approached our team, the client was operating a monolithic system that was costly to maintain and expand. The tools used to build it were outdated, and the user interface did not meet modern standards for speed and accessibility.

The Innovedge Soft team was tasked with developing:

• A web portal for vendors with essential tools for data collection: calendar synchronization, survey systems, and on-site check-in functionality
• A web portal for managers with tools to manage resources and perform initial processing of collected data

A key requirement from the client was to maintain the functionality of the existing system while gradually migrating features from the old system to the new one, ensuring that both systems could operate in parallel during the transition.

As part of the project, the following steps were undertaken:

• Develop a roadmap for “splitting” the existing monolithic software in order to build a new system using a microservices architecture.
• Create prototypes of the portals in Figma.
• Implement the backend and frontend components of the applications using modern development tools, following the approved roadmap.

More details on each stage of the work.

Prototyping and Design

At this stage, the primary focus was on designing the core architecture of the application: defining its key screens, mapping the user flow, and determining which third-party services would be integrated. First, a Figma project was created with three main screens. In this case, the client was presented with the login screen, the customer information form, and a map showing available vendors.

Development

During the implementation of the microservices architecture, our team leveraged the latest tools available within the .NET platform.
For the web application, we used the Angular framework — a modern and efficient frontend development tool commonly paired with the .NET platform.

In the absence of a mobile application, special attention was given to responsive design: hundreds of vendors used a wide range of mobile devices in their work, and the user interface of our applications needed to display correctly and comfortably on every device.

The implementation of the system automated the company’s critical business processes, resulting in:

• Significant reduction in resources required for vendor operations and processing data collected from each point of sale
• Improved vendor performance through automated calculation and analysis of their KPIs
• Increased overall efficiency of vendor operations