Technology Consulting

Kantar Worldpanel is a global provider of consumer insights and consulting services. The company manages consumer panels and solutions in over 90 markets and helps brands build data-driven strategies and make informed decisions. Kantar reached out to Digiteum to provide digital technology and strategy consulting services — review one of the company’s platforms, suggest improvements and offer an approach to scale-up.

Senior analysts and engineers at Digiteum were assigned to review the Shoppix platform for managing consumer loyalty programs. Digital technology consulting project included the analysis and testing of iOS and Android applications, backend, integrations and API. The team was supposed to review platform architecture and source code, identify issues and come up with the list of practical recommendations for platform optimization and improvement. Additionally, the team conducted market research, provided digital strategy consulting services and offered Kantar the approach to bring the Shoppix platform to the Chinese market.

Our team reviewed the platform in terms of performance stability, reliability, security, and code optimization opportunities.

Azure-based backend analysis made a large part of consulting technology services provided by Digiteum. The team analyzed the code, found several issues and provided recommendations for improvement:

• Reconsider system architecture. The platform includes several nearly identical applications for different regions, each maintained and supported separately. We suggested a modular architecture with a unified nucleus and individual region-specific modules for different applications. This approach would drastically reduce cost and effort for application maintenance and support and simplify the scale-up.
• Upgrade security. The team found severe security issues such as weak password generation algorithms and insecure storage of passcodes and keys. We suggested a more intelligent algorithm for hash password generation and provided recommendations to enhance customer data security.
• Optimize code. Digiteum team reviewed the code, found improvement opportunities and provided recommendations to make the code more optimized and elegant.
• Test performance. The team pointed out the need to conduct performance tests considering high load capacity requirements for the backend and API.

This project is a good example of a business technology consulting case study. The client asked Digiteum team to provide a conceptual approach to bring the platform to the Chinese market. This market is very specific in terms of technical capacities — many services and technologies are unavailable or blocked, others can be used only partially.

We conducted a profound technology and business analysis and selected the available alternatives that could substitute the third-party platforms and services integrated with Shoppix. For example, the team suggested using WeChat and Weibo instead of Facebook and JWT services for key generation.

Additionally, Digiteum reviewed Azure services blocked in China and offered alternatives for the platform’s backend. Following these recommendations, the client would be able to tailor the platform to the requirements of the Chinese market preserving its functionality and stable performance.

Digiteum team has enormous experience in mobile application design and development. We have reviewed Shoppix iOS and Android applications and found several issues with the design and performance:

• iOS application was built with a range of Apple guidelines violations. We offered improvements and optimizations.
• iOS application had poor multilingual capabilities. We offered using an alternative library for more flexible localization and better rendering.
• We found ways to improve and optimize the code of the Android application.

This project is a good example of digital strategy consulting. Soon after this project was complete, Kantar approached our team again with another consulting project. We made estimations, workload assessment and referred the client to the specialists that could work on the project.

• Cutting edge digital technology consulting and profound analysis of the client’s applications, Azure backend and API.
• Practical recommendations to optimize code, improve security, enhance performance, reduce cost and effort for development, maintenance and support.
• Review of mobile applications against design and development best practices.
• Digital strategy consulting case for platform scale-up to new markets.

CLIENT: Kantar Worldpanel
TEAM: 4 
YEAR: 2019