How Agency Thinking Can Empower Change
The Challenge
Zonal is the UK’s largest Hospitality software and hardware provider, powering some of the country’s largest brands, such as JW Wetherspoon, Mitchell and Butler, Pizza Express and over 30,000 other bars and restaurants nationwide.
Seeking to upgrade their traditional client-server on-premise solution, Zonal had started a journey to build their next generation products utilising cloud services and mobile devices, combining over 40 years of industry knowledge with the latest technology.
Having scaled up their internal delivery team to over 100, Zonal were looking for an experienced and trusted partner to help inform front-end technology choices and assist in the Delivery process.
xDesign has been a key strategic partner in helping realise our next generation product. Working across multiple teams, disciplines and stakeholders; delivering strategic and operational value to the business.
The Solution
We quickly set about learning all we could about the existing work that the internal Zonal teams had completed, which was largely backend services and a Xamarin Forms-based mobile application.
The challenge was to create a cloud-based Front-end web application that would enable multi-tiered access, brand, franchise and site controls, while remaining configurable and scalable.
The xDesign team carried out an initial Discovery period to review Front-end technologies and scalable enterprise frameworks, in order to source local professionals and expedite the delivery. By working through the brief, we presented the best technology options, and as a combined team we chose to move forward with React.
We then set about preparing the project for success. By establishing Patterns, Components, Localisation, Access Control, Accessibility and Responsiveness, we ensured all standards were set before making scalability and performance priorities for delivery.
The xDesign team integrated seamlessly into the Zonal Product Development teams, as we worked together as one powerful team to deliver key milestones.
Going Above and Beyond
We saw an opportunity to help Zonal usher in the next generation of point of sale software and consider what that would look like and the impact that it would have on business. Eager to future-proof the solution and provide Zonal with a product that could handle massive growth, we looked towards supporting them on the implementation and integration of Auth0 for single point access control across the product suite, building scale in Zonal’s front-end team and other departments, building a strong culture of UI and UX design and using Storybook to reduce technical debt and the reinventing of the wheel.
The Results
We helped Zonal develop and deliver and the next generation of point of sales solutions, the infrastructure that underpins millions of transactions across the UK.
Our Augmented Engineering allowed us to integrate with Zonal’s team to provide support and technical and strategic leadership to ensure the solution was delivered on time and on budget.
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