Spice UK's Travel Management Operations Platform
CodeStep UK's platform software was chosen as the basis for a UK wide travel franchise business and became one of the most complex solutions we have offered.
The solution was to develop a platform in stages, to address a major problem with the businesses legacy software that still ran under MS-DOS!
The first stage was to design and develop a new database structure - one that would allow all existing business data to be transferred to a single solution, provide new features and possibilities, and remain scalable for the years ahead.
The next stage was to build a fully bespoke CRM and e-commerce API. There wasn't a single piece of software on the market that could do what the customer needed, so we developed a fully functional and highly modular solution that allowed not only the typical transactions and operations the business needed today, but also created a polymorphic engine that allowed any C# developer to add new features and functions to the platform as the business grew over time.
New product types, payment types and even API connectors themselves could be added by any developer without having to change or re-test any other part of the commerce system.
Working with partners and teams in other countries - Spice UK commissioned two major modules to plug straight into our platform - both of which would use our custom API solution to manage all the operations and requests of the customers journey.
The first was a highly complex Booking System tool that allowed staff to manage and create new travel bookings, from flights and accomodation through to the add on sales such as taxis and travel arrangements - using a shopping basket style approach and highly bespoke user interface, the developers created the front end for our commerce API, and embedded straight into our platform as a popup window.
The second major piece was the Public Website - built entirely by a third party using our API specification and documentation - they were able to produce a fully functional self-service platform for customers that allowed bookings to feed straight into the core platform we developed.
Spice UK became one of our most complex and scalable solutions, and was the first to use our new "API V2" technology as well as the "Web UI" component developed for our DreamServer platform - the first allowing a polymorphic design approach to building components for API systems, and the latter allowed highly customizable interface designs by non-programmers using just HTML. The API design allowed additional features to be developed and added at a later date without re-testing everything, and the UI allowed a custom layout interface design that worked with the underlying software just like a template which could be changed "live on the fly" without any programmers or code changes.