Increasing Velocity With Technology
Increasing Velocity With Technology
THE PROBLEM
A Fortune 100 company with more than one thousand stores faced a significant challenge in performing bulk updates on their point of sale systems within their stores. The systems in place caused prolonged problems on the update process that originates from a remote server responsible for software patches and software version tracking in each store. The issues often led to store employees being frustrated, resorting to hard resets of machines mid-update, resulting in further complications and errors. Updates needed to be made regularly and this affected hundreds of store employees on every update. Updating their systems was creating a stigma, culture, and problem that they wanted to fix.
THE SOLUTION
SEQTEK collaborated with the company to devise an innovative solution: a splash screen that established seamless communication with the middleware systems. Most of the frustration was around when the update would finish and without knowing, this caused store employees to believe it stalled out or froze. We decided to create a screen that displayed a clock indicating the duration of the update and real time status. The features that we built around this gave store employees the insight, patience, and communication of the updates on multiple reports. The internal teams worked to enhance the overall architecture of the data and reporting times while we were able to help focus on the internal team members to help provide them a better experience. Both our team and their technical teams were able to create a roadmap that allowed them to focus on their new overall architecture while we helped solve some of the immediate problems that were compounding.
THE TECHNICAL DETAILS
C#, .NET Core, React, SQL, Microsoft Azure
THE OUTCOME
In this transformative approach, the company witnessed a remarkable 90% reduction in the occurrence of hard resets during system updates. This improvement translated to more efficient software deployments for the technical team and a significantly enhanced experience for the store employees. This transformation helped bridge the frustrating gap that was growing between store employees and the technical teams. Overall internal employee morale is higher and user experience is above satisfactory. Time to full deployment was cut in half that impacted over 100 people within the company.
