Client

Our customer is a private international company that’s been on the market for over a century. They operate in over 80 countries , and support businesses that represent different domains, including but not limited to logistics, inspections, certification, and collateral management.

As the company claims, their in-depth knowledge and experience covers all aspects of the supply chain, across a wide range of industries, including food, feed, energy, forestry, sustainability, social compliance, and textiles.

Certifications of our customers obtain and maintain the highest level of integrity through its  accreditations from numerous government and industry organizations,

Project Description

Integration of GlobalGAP API to the system our client was using for certification creation and system. There were several third-party integrations, but the team run by the Elinext Team Lead was responsible for this particular module.

Aside from this global task which took over a year, there were more routine and simple tasks which included some feature implementation and bug systems.

Regarding the integration, the Elinext representative has been involved in RND sessions, communicated with design teams, and had some mutual sessions with the requirements engineer  and the GlobalGAP team.

Challenges

We had only one person working on this project, and he was acting as Elinext representative, oftentimes as a team lead,  and was challenged with the following tasks:

• Feature implementation to the certification system
• Bug fixing for the system across multiple modules of it, including “Invoices”, “Non-conformities”, and others
• Major task of GlobalGAP API integration.
• Ensuring team engagement and synch through different time zones and territorial placement

Process

We used Scrum methodology while working on the project. We had weekly demos and daily standups.

For the most part, our senior developer received tickets with tasks, as they were completed, more complex and comprehensive tasks went our way, including planning, offering new projects on code, or security improvements

The team's structure was changed a couple of times during our cooperation with the company. Close to the end of cooperation, the Elinext representative  was leading a small dev team that contained 5 people.

Solution

Overall, the model of cooperation working on the project was fairly simple.

It started with the client's request, we discussed the requirements, approved the budget, planned features, and implemented them. After that, we fixed the bugs and went to delivery through testing, staging, and production environments.

Application Module

The client gets a link where they can fill in their information about the product they want to be certified. As the certification application is filled, the admin can view and assess it in the system with the help of the Application module. The admin can confirm the application and assign the person responsible alongside leaving comments on the matter with the help of this module.

Contract Module

As the client is confirmed, this module gets activated. The contract is generated for each client and is sent to the applicant for the signature. After being signed, the contract becomes active, and the client has to be created in another system.

GlobalGap API Client Module

Integration of this module was the main task that took around a year of the total time of Elinext cooperation with the customer that was ongoing for 18 months total.  It’s API, so seamless connectivity with the system was vital for our customer. It’s important to note, that this is not the only third-party API integrated into the main system, but Elinext has interacted mostly with this one.

Audits Module

With the help of the module, one can create an audit, and choose an assignee who’d be responsible for the certification, planned dates, and types of audit (announced, unannounced).

Non-Conformities

With the help of this module, all the non-conformities are displayed. Certificate creation can be done after these non-conformities are resolved. 

Certificates Module

Certificate creation for clients of our customers is possible with the help of the validation service system.

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It is worth noticing that there are multiple other modules in the operating system, but it makes little sense to describe all the functionality, we only highlighted the core ones and the ones we were working on the most.

Results

At the moment, we stopped cooperating with the client as they changed their policy of working with non-in-house employees.

Elinext is an outsource software development company that is always ready to augment a developer, or a team of developers to strengthen one’s tech capabilities. However, it’s always up to our client to choose the policy and terms of cooperation with us.

Anyway, the cooperation was successful and beneficial to both parties. A team lead from Elinext provided top-notch software development services for our client and managed an international squad effectively while deploying new features to the product.

The main result of our cooperation is the seamless integration of GlobalGAP API which is still ongoing, but would’ve taken much bigger time and budget, hadn’t we been involved. We received nothing but positive feedback from our customers, and if their policies change in the future, our developers will be able to strengthen their tech capabilities.