Commercial Landscape Management Platform Transforms and Goes SAAS with Upstaff Team

Our team took over the platform development and support for the professional landscaping company.

Key Project Requirements

The client engaged our team to scale the business by re-engineering the company’s landscaping management software platform into a multi-tenant/SaaS and become a landscaping market operator in the US.

After systems audit, the following conclusions were made:

• On the backend and frontend, key software components (Angular, iOnic and Node) were legacy versions.
• Proprietary and unsupported libraries were found. Some of the key services inherited code structures from these libraries.
• Infrastructure was not consolidated and split across four cloud platforms
• On the front end, there are also some connections to the proprietary libraries, but it would be easier to replace them if there was no source code.
• The codebase was relatively well structured with low coupling and high cohesion.

While the initial vision was converting to SaaS model and adding  more functionality, the investigation and reengineering proved necessity of re-establishing the project foundation for further solution development. The team worked to upgrade the platform from the existing version, which had many functionality flaws, many proprietary libraries and legacy code, to the new version. The existing system had a rather complicated and fragmented infrastructure, with parts of it distributed across multiple cloud providers, and information about each component had to be discovered. Different parts of the system were distributed across Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, MongoDB Atlas, and GitlabCI. Only the Microsoft Azure part was presented to the team from the beginning. During the short maintenance window, the Upstaff team performed a system upgrade to the new version, which included:

•     Upgraded key infrastructure components
•     User Data migration, including user data and files
•     New system Deployment
•     3rd party integration changes

The new platform has enhanced functionality, including new workflows and existing workflow changed, Spanish language support, new mobile app versions. The new version was deployed on the consolidated infrastructure. Under the hood: Legacy components have been refactored, proprietary libraries replaced by standard commonly supported versions. Numerous performance and security improvements have been made as well.

Project stack

Outcome and business Impact:

1. After two years of cooperation, the software’s new SAAS version has been published, which allowed the Client to onboard similar companies and upgrade from market participants to market operator. 2. With the mobile apps released to the App Store and Google Play, user coverage increased significantly, estimated by 150-200%.

• Previously, the mobile apps were distributed via private distribution channels – links, IPA files, etc.
• This enables more people from the current partners to work directly in the field and track their work.
• Acquiring new users became much easier: landscapers and service partners can easily find and install the app.
• After the new version release, already 230 people are using the iPhone version and around 100 on the Android.

3. App Store distribution makes it much easier to track the audience, better gather business data, and control updates. Before, it was an issue to fix bugs, update the mobile app and keep it updated. 4. Spanish-speaking users can now use the application. 5. More business logic have been added 6. Replacing existing Windows reporting tool with web-based reports.