Dedicated team for a PoS ecosystem development & optimization

Itransition’s dedicated team helped the customer develop and extend POS systems, stabilize the solution’s management platform, upgrade Android firmware, design websites, and support their products.

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Dedicated team for a PoS ecosystem development & optimization

Context

Our customer is a provider of payment processing solutions for thousands of bars, restaurants, and retail businesses. They are headquartered in the USA and have two European development centers. The customer’s hospitality ecosystem includes dozens of products such as PoS systems, a solution management platform, a reports portal for administrators and managers, a financial statistics tool, mobile apps, a website for sales representatives, and a support ticket processing system.

The customer provides reliable, intuitive, and user-friendly PoS systems to their clients. Their competitive advantage is turnkey product delivery since they offer both software and hardware. The customer provides devices tailored specifically to the service area and provides customized design and technology.

Initially, the customer worked on PoS system 1 for small and medium-sized retail businesses. Then, to expand their offering, the customer decided to create PoS system 2, adding new features and improving the user experience. Itransition became part of the development team when PoS system 1 was in development for more than 18 months and still wasn’t released.

Their IT services provider vendor had limited human resources, so the customer decided to hire our developers to expand the project team. They chose Itransition as a new technology partner because of our considerable cooperation portfolio and expertise in ecommerce and custom PoS development.

The scope of work included not only PoS systems development, but also stabilizing the solution’s management platform, upgrading the Android firmware for the customer’s devices, and a range of smaller tasks. We selected suitable specialists from our talent pool and appointed a dedicated team for the project.

Solution

PoS system

Itransition’s team started with a pilot project, developing a web interface that enabled remote management and report generation in POS system 1. After that, we released a closed beta version of PoS system 1 for some of the customer’s clients, which was successful.

After the beta version release, Itransition helped the customer deliver PoS system 1, a SaaS web-based payment processing and employee management solution for small and medium businesses. It facilitates basic sales management, employee performance monitoring, and financial statistics review. The solution is module-based, which allows users to choose the features they need and hide the rest.

PoS system 2 is a SaaS web-based enterprise payment processing solution for restaurant and bar merchants allowing for real-time accurate and fraud-free transactions. The solution also offers accounting and auditing capabilities, bank and processor neutrality, card-present and card-not-present transaction options, solid customer experience, and 24/7 support.

Since users’ needs vary, Itransition created the PoS system 2 to be easily expandable and customizable. When the customer needs new, more domain-specific features, the solution can be integrated with products from the Developer Marketplace.

After the PoS system 2 release, the customer’s user base tripled.

Solution management platform

Itransition’s backend JavaScript developers helped stabilize and improve the technical health of the customer’s сloud solution management platform. This platform receives all the information from the PoS terminals, providing users with remote 24/7 access to online reports, menu organizers, and employee management tools.

Our specialists worked on the two-way real-time operations synchronization between the PoS solution and the cloud platform. Itransition’s team also designed and developed new platform modules such as time-clock management and employee scheduling. In addition to that, within four weeks we developed a mass rollout tool to speed up the process of merchants’ migration from the old platform to a more robust and stable one.

Android firmware update

Our embedded software development team upgraded the PoS systems’ firmware to the latest Android version to ensure faster performance and better security. The new firmware provides an autoupdate feature to release OS-level security patches and performance improvements to merchants. Further firmware upgrades to the newest Android versions are now facilitated by a smooth autoupdate mechanism. Our team continuously introduces new Android features and provides support for new Android devices.

Other subprojects

Itransition's specialists also worked on:

Developing a flexible tool for visualizing financial statistics, written in Ember.js.
Delivering an admin web interface that enables remote setup of system parameters for restaurant managers.
Creating a web sales center website for the customer’s sales agents and resellers to access product information, demonstrate PoS terminals to potential clients, make sample orders, and generate documents for digital signage.
Developing an iPad sales center app that helps automate the client onboarding process and enables the customer’s employees to create and validate new accounts. One of the challenges was to align the app with paperwork updates for order processing that the customer changes every three months. Itransition’s team developed a method that accelerated this process from several months to 2-3 weeks for both iPad and online products.
Stabilizing a legacy reports portal written in ASP.NET. The reports portal allows for tracking financial information and bookkeeping activities, as well as gathering data for business analytics.
Creating a command center written in ASP.NET MVC. Itransition also inherited this project, stabilized and debugged it, provided support for the solution, and developed new functionality.
Delivering static websites for the customer’s branding and marketing campaigns. Itransition performed full website refactoring to make them cleaner, faster, and mobile-ready.

Process

Development

Itransition reviewed each of the customer’s products and delivered audit results and a list of to-do action items. After that, our team performed code refactoring, product stabilization, development of new functionality if needed, and bug fixing. Then we proceeded to work on product testing, maintenance, and support.

We established the process of regular deliveries for stable product versions. Our team helped organize SDLC best practices such as bug fixing, CI & CD configuration, code-review setup, pull-requests, GitFlow, and version release methods. Continuous testing during the solution’s lifecycle allowed us to deliver high-quality code that required only two QA engineers for final review on the customer’s side.

Project management

The customer has a cross-national team working on their software and hardware, with 20 experts in the USA, 40 in Europe, and 21 in Belarus. Working with several geographically dispersed teams, we consolidated the technical and domain knowledge in one scalable development stream and provided an expert for every project in the ecosystem.

To ensure fast issue resolution, some members of our team permanently worked at the US office, while others went on frequent trips to the customer’s site. To streamline the training and onboarding process, Itransition’s project manager also helped handpick the right specialists for the Lithuanian team.

The work on the project was divided into two-week sprints with daily stand-ups. Itransition regularly provided the customer with deliverables and achievement presentations. We also introduced the practice of tech talks, where we discussed project problems and found solutions to them.

Technologies

Project	Technologies
POS systems	Java, Android SDK, SQLite, RabbitMQ, Gradle, Kotlin
Solution management platform	Node.js, Express, Sequelize, PostgreSQL
Development infrastructure	Jira, Confluence, Git, Jenkins, Sonar, Docker, Crashlytics
Hosting infrastructure	Amazon S3, Amazon ECS, Docker

The full technology stack used on multiple projects includes: ASP.NET MVC, Highcharts, jQuery, jQuery DataTables, Ember.js, Ember-Electron, Moment.js, SOAP, Mocha.js, jsSHA, Bootstrap, Docker, Jenkins Pipeline, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Node.js, SQLite, PostgreSQL, Jira, Confluence, RabbitMQ, Rx, Gradle, Express, Sequelize, Git, Sonar, Docker, Crashlytics.

Results

Thanks to Itransition’s contribution, the customer was able to:

Release POS systems 1 and 2
Increase their user base threefold
Stabilize the solution management platform
Update the Android platform
Implement new software tools for internal use, enhancing the company’s business processes

Throughout the cooperation, Itransition demonstrated the ability to quickly set up professional teams. We stabilized the customer’s legacy solutions and added new functionality to them. Our experts also helped the customer organize product releases and cut costs. Moreover, we established an effective and transparent development process, as well as communication between experts from different countries. We also streamlined client onboarding so that it would take 2-3 weeks instead of several months.

Since Itransition’s developers proved to be valuable team members, the customer decided to hand over the solution’s support activities to us, so our experts are currently working on stabilizing, debugging, and supporting the customer’s products.

Dedicated team for a PoS ecosystem development & optimization

Context