S4RB bridges the gap in the client feedback loop providing retailers with insights into what their customers really think of their products. Our dedicated team works with S4RB maintaining and improving their systems.
S4RB helps retailers work closer with their suppliers providing tools to monitor feedback, product development and quality. To manage their range of products, S4RB had traditionally employed in-house programmers. However, with growing costs of IT in the UK and a difficulty recruiting people with the profile they required, S4RB decided to build an external IT team to work alongside their existing developers and product manager. The brief included maintaining their current systems, modernizing existing code and building new products when demand required.
Secret Source have built two teams of three programmers. One specialised in the MEAN stack and one team building new products specialised in JS, Azure and PHP. In addition we provide devops developers on demand.
After many years of working with an in-house development team, S4RB have moved to a fully remote team for the first time. The transition took 4 months and has been a huge success. We have increased our team from 3 MEAN developers to 8 developers with 3 interns in the first year.
We enjoy a very close relationship with S4RB, we participate in all meetings from daily standups to random coffees with their Nottingham based staff, our developers pair-program with their team and we regularly meet up face to face in our Las Palmas office or in Nottingham.
We run three teams on different projects:
Affinity
Our team maintain and refactor their product built on the MEAN stack and improve the structure of the data source.
Technologies: MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node
Engage
The aim of the project is to disengage a dependency on PHP from an Oracle SAAS platform, into a standalone NodeJS application, to allow the Affinity team to work on it together.
Technologies: Angular, Node, Typescript
Serverless solutions using Azure
S4RB stored customer data in an old database that was difficult to use and load into their BI tool Tableau. We created a Serverless ETL architecture in Azure, that connects each day to an old database, extracts the data and saves it into a warehouse to be consumed by Tableau BI. The system uses flexible filters to allow users to select the data they require.
Technologies: Node.js, Azure functions, Azure logic apps, Oracle RightNow, Snowflake, Tableau
S4RB started it’s journey to find an nearshore provider two years before finding a secret source, and after a failed attempt with another provider we learnt a number of valuable lessons. We realised how important it was to have a personal relationship to a provider that was critical to our success.
Secret Source were upfront and honest with us from the start and that transparency has continued. We’ve had challenges during the onboarding, but with their commitment and clear communication we have succeeded and see a long term partner of the business.
Over the next year we will be building new products and expanding the existing range of features on their live systems. We are looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship together.