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Case Study

Helping our client
hit their mark

The Client
A Fortune 100, international, big box retailer with over 1,800 retail stores in the United States and over $70 billion in annual revenue.

Business
Opportunity

Mobile phone engagement
New line of business —
Activating Pre-Paid Mobile
phones in-store
Activating
Mobile
Phones

Success
Snapshot

Our client was able to
implement in only 3 months.
Integrating over 15 carriers.
66%Production
Time Saved
15+Carrier
Integration

The
Request

The retailer requested Coral Edge to deliver a point-of-sale (POS) system for utilization in all 1,800+ retail stores for the purpose of providing this service offering. The POS required the following features:
  • - Cloud-based, utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • - Integration with the client’s backend systems for payments and business intelligence
  • - Integration with mobile network operators and their third-party vendors
  • - Ability to scale rapidly to onboard numerous carrier brands - accounting for each carrier’s unique technical requirements
SALES ASSOCIATE
FEATURES:
  • - Scan SIM & IMEI details
  • - Input guest information
  • - Select prepaid plan and/or purchase additional real-time, top-up prepaid mobile minutes for customer’s existing prepaid plan
  • - Port-in mobile number
  • - Apply carrier-specific, time-sensitive discounts and promotions
  • - Issue retailer-specific coupons
  • - Receive the order confirmations
  • - Print customer receipts
RETAIL PRODUCT
ADMINISTRATOR FEATURES:
  • - Management of complete prepaid plan catalogs for numerous mobile phone carriers
  • - API exception management
  • - Data management and analytic reporting
  • - Business Intelligence (BI)

The
Process

Coral Edge provided the client full-lifecycle product development - including business analysis, solution design, development, testing and delivery.
To provide the highest quality resources, responsive client engagement and attention to budget, Coral Edge applied an onshore/offshore resourcing model for the product development - using an onshore project manager, business analyst and solution architect and an offshore development team.
Analysis
& Design
Kicking off product development, business analysts gathered all technical and business requirements from the retailer, mobile network operators (MNOs), and third-party vendors to account for all development and integration requirements. The Solution Architect designed the POS in compliance with all technology guidelines and governance constraints, as well as all MNO related governance constraints.
Development, Testing
& Delivery
Through the combined efforts of the onshore Project Manager and offshore development team, and a collaborative testing effort with the client - Coral Edge developed, tested and delivered the fully functioning, point-of-sale application - on-time and on-budget, in three months.
Support, Maintenance
& Future Enhancements
Upon the successful launch of the prepaid application, the client also chose to partner with Coral Edge to provide cost-effective, ongoing, 7-days a week support - rather than bring the support of the application in-house.
 

The Technical
Solution

The retail prepaid point-of-sale application provides all features needed for both the in-store sales associates and the retail product administrators to fully support the guided customer journey and mobile carrier’s brand management.
IMPLEMENTATION:
Employing AWS cloud services, Coral Edge developed an Angular front-end web application utilizing a nodeJS API service layer running on Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) with auto-scaling groups which allow the platform to scale seamlessly with the varying load and to handle failover situations. Storage is provided through an Amazon RDS MySql Database for back-end APIs
Data management, analytic reporting and third-party API exception management is contained within the single application; providing full-feature, back-of-house data exception administration, plus real-time analytics - allowing the retailer to view daily, weekly and monthly transactional and revenue data. This data is also fed to the client’s Splunk instance to allow for data visualization. The use of Ansible allows for environment provisioning and continuous application deployment automation through a Jenkins pipeline.

The Success Story

TIMELINE:
By partnering with Coral Edge, our client was able to launch their in-store point-of-sales application in just 3 months vs. the 18-month estimate provided by their backlogged internal IT team.
PRODUCTION TIME SAVINGS The Coral Edge onshore/offshore product development resource model resulted in an estimated 66% reduction in cost to implement the initial POS vs. the internal development estimate.
CARRIER INTEGRATION Since the launch of the prepaid activations point-of-sale application in 2016, Coral Edge has continued to deliver featured enhancements as well as the integration and onboarding of new mobile carrier brands, bringing the total number of MNOs and MVNOs supported on the prepaid in-store application to nearly 15 carriers - allowing the retailer to amount multi-million-dollar revenue gains through the new prepaid activations offering.