Improving Price Transparency In Fragmented Liquor Distribution Market In Africa

Having crucial elements that needed to be addressed, we focused on creating the Minimum Viable Product by implementing agile workflow. Taking product's core objectives and client’s context into account, we created user journeys for both buyers and sellers. We distilled these user journeys into detailed use cases and designed wireframes underpinned with linear flows towards the goal completion.

Over the next few sprints, we refined the MVP based upon the feedback received. Once the MVP was incorporated with the fresh perspectives, we focused on marking the product capabilities' progression by integrating different ERP systems using Dell Boomi to establish a bidirectional information flow to synchronise inventory, orders, prices, offers and debtors.

In the next phase, we worked on strengthening the product capabilities to onboard the supermarkets and retail chains. Most of them were using the ARCH ERP systems and we researched that IBM API Connect fits best for integrating ARCH ERP systems. We created a new platform adoption roadmap and accordingly updated the solution architecture to integrate the ARCH ERP systems with IBM API Connect while keeping the existing Dell Boomi integrations intact.

With the major integrations in place, we focused on the reporting functionality and investigated several cloud-based solutions. Microsoft Power BI emerged as the go-to solution with the right toolkit to allow a push-button analysis of the extensive data set and provide essential insights for client's commercial success. We developed APIs to enable Microsoft Power BI pull data from the product database and provide meaningful insights.

While developing all the functionalities, creating APIs for ERP integrations, we were crystal clear about rolling out the product offerings to market continuously, quickly and in a stable state. We achieved this by implementing Agile and DevOps practices, Octopus Deploy, and utilizing the Azure cloud's power.