Dynamic Discounting SaaS Tool for Buyers and Suppliers
Covering industries like retail, manufacturing, logistics, and services, this tool helps to build a stronger supply chain, controls over payables, and optimizes payment terms. It gives large buyers maximum cash utilization flexibility while controlling their working capital. It reduces buyer costs and helps thousands of suppliers get paid faster.
Technical stack includes:
The problem
We met this customer when they had hard times: they lost a few developers and their CTO was about to leave. This fintech SaaS has been on the market for 6 years and spent most of its time setting up a working business model, they passed through many pivots - the source code was in a really poor condition. So, no people to support it and a buggy system with many performance issues and vulnerabilities. But they had to pay customers and they required serious stabilization and help.
The team
After spending one week in the Netherlands meeting with the whole business team we made a deep review of the system and agreed to set up a part-time team of manager, analyst, QA, DevOps, and developer. Since we were under a strict budget limitation all team members worked part-time so we optimized the cost as much as possible. This team began to grow and we are getting ready to convert it into a dedicated full-time team very soon when sales get better.
Technical support
We provided all possible support for this product despite very strict budget limitations and each time the budget changed we changed the development plan accordingly and concentrated on only critical issues. Both founders and investors were happy with such commitment and we took all the technical jobs in this product. Also, we provide technical support services to the product's customers under the SLA agreement.
CTO duties
Today one of our product experts acts as a CTO for this SaaS product. He takes overall technical issues and decisions, also takes part in onboarding new buyers (which is complicated since they are large companies). We fully represent this product just like our own, helping our client with all challenging technical issues. Many people don't believe that outsourcing the CTO position is possible... We proved the opposite!!!
Dynamic discount calculation
We developed an algorithm that calculates a possible discount a buyer can get if the supplier's invoice is paid earlier. The closer to the due date, the smaller discount is. This core algorithm saves much time for buyers and improves the supply chain and cash flow between companies. We made it available to companies as a SaaS tool that integrates with internal ERP.
Back-end and data processing
95% of the functionality in this project is on its back-end. We implemented different ways of importing and uploading data. This tool came to us in poor condition: overwhelmed database, bad architecture, and monolith back-end. Today we are transforming it into microservice architecture, optimizing database structure, and converting it into big data.
API, integration, configuration
Every buyer is usually a huge company that joins the system with its specifics, ERPs, requirements, etc. We support several APIs to integrate with them but in most cases, we develop custom API for each buyer. To simplify this process we refactored the API layer to make it more flexible.
We developed a configuration to set up the method and time of data processing.
Customer feedback
We met with Ardas at a time when the only developer, who was back then working in our team as a full stack developer and did everything himself, was going to leave us. After several years spent on entering the market and proving and testing the business model, we have gone through all the typical difficulties for a startup and have had some temporary extensions of several developers.
At a certain moment, we had to expand and develop the system and one person was too vulnerable and was not able to handle the extended workload. To extend the development team in the Netherlands there was a huge shortage of full-stack developers and also the costs were quite expensive and we didn’t need it for full time. So we decided to outsource to find a trusted partner at a reasonable rate for a project that has just entered the phase of growth and development.
Ardas took over, controlled and step by step, the entire development, and maintenance of the dynamic discounting SaaS tool for buyers and suppliers. Their specialists came to us in the Netherlands and worked with our developer to transfer the project and the knowledge.
I was pleasantly surprised by the speed and clear communication and understanding of how this is done: the requirements analysis, the code review, the system architecture - everything was done as expected. Later, we identified the team that is needed to continue. We conducted all the necessary business discussions, and they quickly figured out the system and understood what our clients were looking for.
Their experience in fintech and custom development was immediately noticeable as also working as an outsourcing company for scale-ups. They were ready to invest in collaboration and partnership.
For more than 1.5 years, Ardas has been supporting and developing our system and good communication and coordination relieves us of the technical tasks and allows us to grow the business. Meanwhile, they joined our team and management team and since then we have a high-performance development team at hand, even if they work at a distance.
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