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Use Case
Sustainable Cities And Communities
The goal for GoMetro, a prominent player in South Africa's digital transportation sector, centred around creating a transformative Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for their new web app, Bridge. With South Africa having approximately 420,000 heavy-duty trucks and vehicles over an area of 1.2 million sq km (0.46 sq miles), and a national route network of 12,978 km (~8000 miles), the challenges were substantial, including:
This MVP aims to revolutionise fleet management in a country heavily relying on road transportation, providing a scalable and efficient solution in a challenging logistical environment.
To meet investor-related timelines, budget and engineering excellence, Merixstudio assembled a self-managed agile team consisting of five full-time engineers (2x backend, 2x frontend & 1x QA), an engaged Project Manager and an experienced Product Design consultant. They not only delivered high-quality work within ambitious deadlines but also provided valuable advice and verification of assumptions GoMetro needed to fine-tune their product.
This proactive approach, characterised by bold recommendations and exceeding expectations, permeated all aspects of our collaboration with GoMetro. It proved particularly beneficial in developing the telemetry access management feature, where we established clear terms for sharing tracking permissions. Through extensive manual testing, evaluation of various usage scenarios and edge cases and consideration of dependencies, we ensured the bulletproof logic of this functionality and the entire app.
GoMetro also utilised our consultancy services in the field of product design. While they provided us with over 100 Figma views, which were based on their exceptional domain experience and clearly defined business requirements, they decided to validate their work with an external UX/UI expert who possesses broad experience in app design. Merixstudio's Product Design consultant facilitated a seamless workflow between our developers and the client's designers, implemented effective Figma file standards, and identified areas for improvement in the prepared designs.
Both main technologies - Python and React - were suggested by the client, and as already laid in our core competencies they were swiftly implemented in the project. Python was crucial for integrating the app with the client's telemetry system. We also needed to maintain coherence between the user portal and the part of the app prepared by GoMetro within the areas like e.g. vehicle databases.
As the entire product was under development and requirements were evolving, we maintained high flexibility and deployed ongoing modifications. To prepare the app for future growth we implemented DevOps, architectural and other tech solutions ensuring scalability like AWS 2 and Content Delivery Network (CDN) and enabled deploying modifications easily even for app administrators who don’t have programming skills (e.g. in areas like setting vehicles categories, brands and types). Despite time pressure, we prioritised the highest code quality, achieving an 85% code coverage on the backend side.
On the frontend side, we’ve integrated the solution with Google Maps and implemented WebSocket for real-time updates of truck location. Although it wasn’t planned within the initial scope, we’ve also made the app multilingual to future-proof it, considering that there are 11 official languages used in the RSA.
The team has been working for nearly 18 weeks in 2-week sprints which allowed stakeholders to monitor the progress of work. We maintained constant communication with the client's CTO and lead designer, relying on Slack for daily communication. Despite the geographical distance, we effectively collaborated in practically the same time zone. Merixstudio continues to provide maintenance services for GoMetro, with ambitious plans for further development scheduled in 2023.
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Fleet operators