A leading retail logistics provider approached Improving Winnipeg with the request to develop a scalable MVP and a foundation for a new billing application.

Our client has numerous well-established Canadian retail relationships and transportation partnerships. They have been on the market for more than half a century, and are consistently evolving as an organization to meet modern and future client needs.

Our client already had a billing automation that accepted invoices from its partners and billed clients at flat rates. Due to lack of flexibility and a lack of a user-friendly interface, there were many errors and inaccuracies, which led to substantial customer service efforts and client dissatisfaction.

Our client provided us with their vision of what they wanted to have, how they want to cope with all their challenges, and where the areas in which flexibility was important. We joined their team and contributed our expertise to build a brand new billing application that consists of many visuals, grids, auditing, dialogs, and an internal file parser with well-organized data schema rules and validations for various input files from their partners.

With this new application, employees received a user-friendly work tool with instant feedback on input data, well-explained and tracked errors when parsing invoice files, a wizard that guided them through the process of converting input invoice files into accounts payable and receivable, and the means to make necessary corrections, additions, and rate adjustments during the process.

One of the most unique parts of this project was the parser. Due to the wide variety of invoice file formats from partners and the variability of the data scheme in different rows of the same file, we developed a special parser that can handle all these varieties. In addition, the parser has a well-structured way of specifying parsing rules for each partner file separately, and implicit parsing errors collecting with all necessary metadata for user-friendly and traceable output.

Our client was impressed with our on-time delivery within tight deadlines, despite some corrections during development (which was normal – businesses and requirements are still evolving, even during the project development!) and ready-to-deploy and use the MVP version.

Also, since it was a completely new and cutting-edge project, we helped them avoid some pitfalls with technology by introducing well-established patterns (Unit of Work). We also identified and fixed some shortcomings that could easily turn into subtle bugs (statefulness in Blazor affecting services lifetime, issues with authentication in Blazor 8 with Azure Entra ID). And all these corrections were done at the early stage allowing us to help the client avoid further issues and costly changes down the road. 

If you are looking for a scalable MVP, make sure to get in touch by filling out the form at the bottom of the page. A scalable MVP can help collect valuable user feedback and insights.

Our team has been working hard these last few months, and we are excited to share our success with you. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on our most recent  Microsoft 365  projects.