Creating A Shared Project Management Platform For A Client

Our team was tasked with designing a tool that helps our client manage everyday functional services such as accounting for cost, billing their customers and the like. It also acts as a shared procurement and collaborative platform for partner companies to leverage the shared resources and run their operations.

The main challenge for us was to enable such project management capabilities at scale. To counter that, we went about creating a custom ERP solution that enabled our client and their partners to:

1. Manage project management tasks
2. Have access to Products, Services and Specifications to manage Product Information
3. Create estimations to manage the RFQ process
4. Keep track of Purchase, Sales Orders and Invoices
5. Set up a messaging mechanism (Chat and Group Chat)
6. Focus on Customer Relationship Management: Includes managing Contacts, Customers and Vendors

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Our team went about creating this solution by deploying a tech stack that was made up of the following:

1. A comprehensive Microservices architecture
2. HTML, CSS, Angular for front-end development
3. PHP, Laravel for backend development
4. PgSQL, MongoDB, Elastic Search for Database management
5. Microsoft Azure for DevOps
6. Integrations such as:

1. Third-Party Software:

1. Microsoft Great Plains for Financial Accounting
2. Avalara for automated Sales Tax

1. Other Software Systems/ Platforms:

1. Version List for Budget Plans in Distribution List
2. POET for Campaigns
3. Store Profiler for Vendor-specific stores

Deploying this tech stack allowed our team to overcome challenges such as:

1. Speed of accessing different areas in the application
2. Too many steps to get an estimate done
3. The rigid structure of Product + Service for a form's existence. 
4. The complexity of adding a task to the schedule
5. Inability to directly bill for the time spent on a job's task. 
6. Inability to save filters and use them in areas like Jobs list.

As a result of our solution, we were able to help our client improve on the following counts:

1. Multi-server microservices have increased speed by 200%
2. Less multitasking and number of clicks, more automated process
3. Higher scalability
4. Easy to use across devices
5. Each microservice behaves as an independent application, SO Chat, CRM, RFQ can be independent applications for plug and play

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Post the handover of the solution to the client, here are a few key takeaways that we noticed in their operations:

1. If one of the services is down, other services will still run as we built the platform on Micro-Services architecture
2. Each service can behave as an independent application that can be sold as an app.
3. The application can be used by large organizations as a Custom ERP to manage their entire business processes.

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