How a Californian Startup in Analytics and Business Intelligence Used Digicorp’s World-Class Services
to Build a Powerful, Scalable, and User-Centric Product
Insights That Matter
Project Scope
To augment the back-end and create the front-end for a retail intelligence platform powered by AI & ML.
Scale
Millions of Records, Hundreds of Stores.
Inception:
Duration:
Current Status:
New Feature Development, Maintenance, 100% Client Satisfaction.
Team:
4 Developers
1 Designer
1 Part-Time Quality Analyst
1 Product Manager
Introduction
Rising up to a Unique Product Development Challenge
About RightSense:
Headquartered in California, RightSense is an analytics & AI platform for Gas Stations in the U.S. and their Retail Store analytics. It enables its users to unlock their data for growth and profitability through actionable insights, rich visualizations and timely alerts.
Key Challenge:
The platform’s back-end had been built by an Indian tech firm based in the city of Ahmedabad. They were looking for a competent technology partner with a proven track record to take over the project. The various areas in which they were seeking top-notch services were:
- Maintenance of the existing features.
- Feature engineering.
- New feature development.
- Enhancing UI/UX to create seamless user journeys.
How They Got in Touch with Us
In early 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic just reached the world, around the same time, Digicorp was approached by the Ahmedabad-based tech team to take over the RightSense project.
They wanted us to develop the next stage of the product along with providing the necessary maintenance for the components that were already developed. Resilient back-end and impactful UI-UX design being our forte, we were in a unique position to deliver the specific requirements that the client was looking for.
Initial Discussions – Moving from Fragmented Analytics Components to a Holistic Business Intelligence Product
Real-time Capabilities at Scale:
One of the earliest clients of RightSense was a chain of gas stations in California that needed to mine huge amounts of data (1,00,000+ records) from its fuel stores and pumps across 132 gas stations to monitor petrol and gas levels, daily transactions, in-store sales, proceeds from car wash, and so on.
Digicorp successfully managed the handling of such voluminous data through scalable coding and intelligent logic development.
Translating Raw Inputs into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
We enhanced the relevant KPIs for each gas station such as:
- Total revenue per day
- Distribution of total revenue per day like fuel sales, in-store sales, car wash sales, etc.
- Total volume of fuel sold per day, by type (petrol/diesel/gas)
- Transactions by number and value per day from POS scan data in real-time that refreshes every 15 minutes and unifies diverse data across different kinds of POS
- Total no. of footfall in the station and the store per day
- Total expenses in a day
- Per day profitability
- Fuel margins
- In-store SKU Rationalizations
KPI Aggregation and Comparison:
Digicorp team also created logics such that these KPIs also could be totalled and averaged over each day, week, month, quarter and year, and compared across each time frame across all gas stations by location, size, etc.
User-specific Dashboards for Decision-Making:
Finally, for informed and timely decision-making, intelligent dashboards covering all relevant insights like:
- Performance assessment of cashiers
- Effectiveness of loyalty programs
- Optimization of promotions & offers based on consumer behaviour
- Store performance and product rationalization
- Per-hour productivity rates, and more.
These user-specific dashboards are currently being implemented by Digicorp for sharing with admins and other back-end decision-makers for smarter, faster, and better decision-making.
Four Pillars of RightSense Platform:
Right from the beginning, we kept the big picture in mind and envisioned that scalability, usability, speed, and accuracy were the four pillars of the project’s successful implementation.
Our Approach
Feature Engineering:
By having intensive and continuous discussions with the client across all the stages of the product lifecycle, we ensured that the final product had all the necessary features that the client had requested.
We also suggested several out-of-the-box features based on the client’s goals and helped the client team in identifying the best technology to enable those features in the long run.
Overcoming Challenges:
A key challenge we had faced was that while the project was being handed over to us, the previous tech team who had worked on the product had removed a core component from the back-end since it was IP-protected and could not be shared with us readily.
Though they tried to patch it up with additional coding, this slowed down the platform drastically and our team had to re-write the code from scratch, and also incorporate the new changes and requests from the client on-the-go.
However, we rose up to the challenge and ensured that we adhered to the product milestones and timelines. This led to immense satisfaction on the part of the client.
Conclusion
RightSense platform deals with a vast volume of real-time and historical transaction data that has to be captured, processed and analyzed quickly on a regular basis. Further, in near future, the company plans to use proprietary algorithm and ML and AI modules along with a special emphasis on data relationships. We are excited to have partnered with RightSense and hope to continue our association with them.
Read RightSense’s testimonial for Digicorp here: