Overview
Imagine you’re the CEO of a company that sells a supply chain management solution. Business is good, and you’re serving your customers and meeting their growing demands.
Your customers want a feature to know how financially healthy their global supply chain network is, on demand. So, you expand your current platform to include this new feature.
So far, so good. Your tech team is already busy running the business. You can’t slow down operations while adding new features to your offering.
That was the challenge our contractor management software client faced. Headquartered in Orem, Utah, Avetta LLC helps organizations in more than 120 countries manage contractual supply chain compliance with their SaaS-based solution.
Avetta’s cloud-based Avetta Connect® platform helps organizations access and manage a network of third-party contractors and subcontractors. It includes tools for risk assessment, compliance tracking, performance monitoring, workforce management, built-in reporting, and supply chain analytics. By using the Connect platform, users can reduce the number of safety incidents by as much as 55% compared to industry averages.
Here's how we helped Avetta improve its product and achieve its business goals.
Challenges
Avetta tried to meet its product managers’ roadmap and had begun making big improvements for Avetta’s customers. Avetta needed to continue to meet customer and market demands while developing a new feature, so they decided to leverage a partner.
Avetta needed to build a full exchange-to-exchange solution, including technology and potential work backlogs. The company especially needed to release timelines that its team could commit to the executive team.
Avetta also wanted to expand its product stack to provide customers with a better view of their global supply chain network’s financial health. Other features needed were the ability to access supplier financial metrics across geographic boundaries, report legal findings, and monitor business risks using values from such sources as the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and Adverse Media Screening.
In addition, Avetta wanted to bring more third-party data into their system with the help of integrations to enhance decision-making on suppliers who work for their clients. Users also wanted the ability to check their supplier’s current regulatory compliance and improved supplier evaluations, which would make the entire supply chain safer and more efficient.
SoftServe began with design, which included a business and technology analysis and what was needed to successfully complete the project.
Solution
SoftServe’s technology team developed application programming interface (API) integrations within the existing platform and built additional APIs with multiple third-party financial and cybersecurity partners. This included the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT).
While Avetta has a skilled and experienced technical team, SoftServe brought its own expertise to the project. This included the latest industry best practices. By working with Avetta’s technical team as peers, we built trust in the solution we were helping Avetta to create.
As the project’s integration partner, we worked with Avetta to build these solutions. The team:
- Addressed technical problems and other challenges
- Prepared a data flow visualization
- Offered technical advice
SoftServe applied the extract, transform, and load (ETL) integration process to increase the number of services provided by Avetta to the clients on its platform. By developing new integrations for our client, Avetta’s user interface can now be used to monitor business risks such as OFAC/Sanctions and Adverse Media.
We offered a solution that used multiple frontend and backend platforms, including Elm, JavaScript, Scala, and MongoDB.
Planning
Each project was broken into four phases: discovery, implementation, enhancement, and closure. The discovery phase included the examination of each separate integration to understand Avetta’s key business objectives. This would provide the information and data necessary to develop the approach and implementation plans.
The SoftServe team started the implementation, enhancement, and closure phases of the project following the Scrum approach to deliver tangible results in every sprint.
The project
For the financial risk integration implementation, we suggested additional features be implemented within Avetta’s existing Connect platform after a series of formal meetings with their leadership and team members. These features would allow Connect users to search for up-to-date business supplier profiles by using various API calls. Risk score fields could also be obtained from financial partners and populated into MongoDB.
Then, following the data aggregation and analytics performed by Avetta’s analytics team, the data could be converted and displayed within the Avetta Connect application. Keeping in mind the default configuration rules and flags.
SoftServe worked closely with the financial partner team to meet these requirements, since they are the scores provider. The financial partner team changed the request of data, and the data flow several times because of changes made in the API. Therefore, we researched and proposed the most efficient approach.
This overall solution provided Avetta’s clients and internal users with the necessary business intelligence capabilities to search for financial information, find and request reports, and check supplier compliance.
Following the successful integration implementation, the SoftServe team continues to work on the FMCSA and cyber partner integration implementations using the same approach. The team makes specific technical decisions for each case to ensure Avetta customers get the most value from those integration results.
Results
For the financial integration, SoftServe extended the functionalities within Avetta’s Connect platform, which allowed Avetta’s clients to search for up-to-date business supplier profiles. Our team used one API call to show business risk scores for each selected supplier. The API displays information regarding sanctions, Adverse Media, bankruptcy, and other pertinent information in Connect if available.
Our task in the FMCSA implementation was to store data obtained from the DOT in Avetta’s database, which Avetta’s customers could then access in the Connect platform. Now, Avetta’s clients can search for carriers that are compliant with DOT regulations and check a carrier’s profile for data regarding unsafe driving, vehicle maintenance, and other information.
Finally, SoftServe provided supplier risk monitoring in Connect by linking to the cyber partner’s APIs.
Conclusion
This engagement, which consisted of three separate project implementations, proved successful for Avetta. Operationally, our solution allowed Avetta’s clients to perform company searches on suppliers to gain better insights into the global supply chain network’s financial health, transportation safety, and cybersecurity. This also included the ability to access supplier financial metrics across geographic boundaries.
Financial integration was important to Avetta because it provided their clients with a risk and liability feature set within the company’s products.
“The team at SoftServe has been a fantastic partner,” said Carrie Garrett, Avetta Program Manager. “Their work has been consistently delivered on time or ahead of schedule. There is a clear commitment to quality and simply ‘doing the right thing.’ I cannot say enough good things about this team!”
SoftServe provided Avetta with the expertise necessary to deliver each project successfully, from building the right plan to creating the right estimates. The team also developed the right budget and committed features set to identify the right software development life cycle.
If the problem we solved for Avetta is a challenge for you, learn how SoftServe can help you build API integrations for your platform. Let’s talk!