Software Product Development for Efficio

Consulting
Software Engineering

Location:

United Kingdom, London

Industry:

Consulting

Partnership period:

January 2016 - present

Client background

Efficio is a UK-based consulting company with offices worldwide helping its clients identify, deliver and sustain improvement opportunities in procurement. It also offers digital solutions to enhance and automate procurement operations.

Client’s goals

Our client, Efficio, is a big procurement consulting company with offices across the globe. Their key objective was to eliminate a lot of manual work their consultants spent on conducting research and analyses. Therefore, Efficio Digital needed a reliable tech partner to help their onsite team develop a number of automation solutions.

To extend their resources and speed up pace of change, they started cooperation with N-iX. Our software development team was to attain the following objectives:

move from the monolith architecture the the service-oriented one;
contribute to the development of the client’s digital products such as OnTrack and eFlow;
work on the system internal stream, develop the services for the onsite development team;
develop a content builder system for reporting and integrate it with Tableau-based data visualisation;
implement centralized authorization system;
develop background processing system and a background monitoring tool;
provide software testing and automate QA processes.

Implementation and challenges resolved

Our team is developing system internal stream and the backbone technology of Efficio solutions. Our developers have solved a range of highly technological tasks and implemented a lot of functionality, starting from microservices and background processing to centralized authorization and test automation.

While developing centralized authorization for the whole infrastructure, the engineers had to ensure the best performance of the system as there are many applications. Therefore, the team created several layers for saving data. When we receive an authorization request, it is saved it in a temporary storage, goes into a queue, gets processed on the background, and is added to the main database. This way we achieve high performance. Planning and realization of this functionality was rather complicated and involved many components. As a result, all services are authorized through our solution. Additionally, we have used Docker for full automation.

Efficio services and software solutions involve a lot of analytics. There are different tools for processing input data and performing a certain business logic. However, all these processes can’t take place at the same time. N-iX engineers implemented the background processing system that put tasks in a queue and performs the calculations on the background. As a result, this speeds up the analysis and the solution provides prompt result to the client. To monitor the work of this solution and delivery of all the tasks in a queue, our specialists have also developed a native background monitoring tool. This dedicated layer allows to see the system from the inside out and oversee the completion of the tasks in a queue.
To ensure the highest quality of the software, N-iX testers automated a lot of quality assurance processes and test cases. We have used Docker and many different types of software testing including Unit Testing, Integration Testing, System Testing, etc. Thus we were able to cover around 99% of different cases. Automation has also allowed us to save a lot of time and resources during full regression, which we performed every time after adding new features and functionality. So instead of taking 3-4 days, it has taken just a few hours.
Additionally, the team has developed a content builder system for reporting and data visualization based on Tableau. We developed custom SDK to integrate Tableau with PHP software.

Value delivered by N-iX

Contributed to developing OnTrack and eView, robust and highly secure applications offered by Efficio Digital;
Delivered the Content Builder System which allows the users to create fully customised content without support from engineering;
Developed a scalable solution for centralized authorization;
Background processing and background monitoring tools we developed helped to streamline onsite team’s development operations, increased efficiency and security of their solutions;
Background processing system has improved the performance of the whole infrastructure and brought flexibility to the development process;
Automation of most test cases and effective quality assurance services accelerated release of new functionality, increased productivity and reliability of solutions.

Expertise delivered:

Dedicated Development Team, Software QA & Testing, Cloud solutions and services, DevOps services and solutions, Software Product Development, Software Architecture