Highlights
- Improving Customer Experience for 37,000 Users: delivered a modern web application with automated report generation and commission calculation that significantly added to business-critical functionality for our client.
- Another Milestone In a Fruitful Partnership: our collaboration with this client dates back as far as 2008. We helped to develop a Nimble Commerce startup that was later acquired by BlackHawk Network, and our teams joined the new owner.
Client
The client is BlackHawk Network Inc. (BHN), a U.S.-headquartered, globally leading provider of branded payment technology solutions, including services like issuing prepaid gift cards, digital payment solutions, rewards programs, and financial technology solutions. The company employs around 4,000 people and serves 28 countries. BHN has thousands of clients and partners, including such market leaders and iconic brands as Kroger, Simon, Disney, Staples, iTunes, BestBuy, Target, and eBay.
We have a long history of partnering with this client, offering custom software solutions for BHN via dedicated development teams for over 7 years. We have nearly 80 experts working for this client in total, providing services including enterprise-grade consolidated platform development, data migration, and reconciliation, as well as introducing microservices architecture. This particular subproject is one of the numerous solutions we delivered over the years.
As a part of our collaboration with BHN, we also developed an Aggregated Merchant Portal (AMP) – a white-label and geography-extensible self-service platform for merchant registration and onboarding. The main goal of this solution is to enable new businesses to join the BHN network with minimal manual assistance and pass the necessary legal entity ID checks. Now, the platform aggregates more than 8000 businesses in the US.
Product
The product is a cloud-based web solution for preparing reports and invoices based on contract settings. It is aimed at merchants and financial teams, and to accomplish its goal collects transactions from the data lake, calculates fees, and builds and sends reports to the users.
Goals and objectives
- Build the Web Application for Contract Settings: develop a highly secure app with a user-friendly interface that allows authorized users to easily navigate through different settings, and use features like creating, editing, and deleting contract settings, defining terms and conditions, setting up pricing structures, managing contract templates, and configuring permissions.
- Integrate the New Contract Solution for Report Generation: ensure seamless communication between the existing system and the new web application to enable users to generate various types of reports such as contract performance reports, financial summaries, and compliance reports.
- Improve the Report Generation Process: optimize database queries to retrieve contract data more quickly, implement caching mechanisms to improve performance, and adjust algorithms used for report generation to reduce processing time. Additionally, address any existing issues or bottlenecks in the current report generation process.
Project challenge
- The Absence of Documentation: make an effort to document the project requirements, technical specifications, API documentation, data schemas, and any other relevant information. Enforce regular documentation updates and version control practices to ensure that documentation remains accurate and up-to-date throughout the project lifecycle.
- Complex Contract Settings: conduct a careful analysis of the business requirements to identify all possible contract settings and their interdependencies, navigating through various parameters such as pricing structures, discount rules, payment terms, and legal terms and conditions.
- Performance and Scalability: find a way tohandle large volumes of contract data, generate complex reports, and process invoices in real time.
- Security and Compliance: implement robust authentication and authorization mechanisms, data encryption, secure coding practices, regular security audits, and compliance checks to mitigate security risks and ensure regulatory compliance.
Solution
After the initial business analysis for this project, we assembled a team of 8 experts, including:
- 2 Front-End Developers
- 5 Back-End Developers
- QA Automation Engineer
We designed the overall system architecture, including the selection of appropriate AWS services such as EC2, EKS, S3, SQS, SNS, Kinesis, Athena and Lambda for hosting, storage, serverless computing, and data processing.
Our experts developed a data model for storing contract information and transaction data, considering factors such as data consistency, scalability, and performance. Our Spark-based data processing pipeline, for transaction processing and report generation, included data ingestion, transformation, and analysis steps.
The Front-End developers, dedicated to this project from our side, delivered an outstanding user interface with visually appealing elements, prioritizing usability, accessibility, and responsiveness as the key components of the design.
To ensure that everything works as expected, our QA Automation Engineer conducted unit testing to verify the correctness of individual components and functions, as well as integration testing to ensure that different modules and services work together as expected.
Our web application has a diverse functionality for contract management, with transaction processing and report generation functionalities being implemented using Spark and AWS services.
Tech Stack
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Java -
Spring -
React -
Angular -
MySQL -
AWS
Our results
After two years of development, we managed to deliver only a part of the planned functionality, as the project was transferred to other teams, while our experts switched their focus to other no less important tasks for the client.
- Expanding Report Generation Functionality: developed a robust reporting system within a web app that provides options for customizing report templates, scheduling automated report generation tasks, and distributing reports to merchants and financial teams.
- Accurate and Transparent Commission Calculation: in parallel with report generation, we enabled our system to calculate commissions based on predefined commission structures.
- User-Friendly Interfaces and Dashboard: we delivered interactive design elements to visualize sales data, track performance trends over time, and monitor commission earnings.
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