How Codehesion helped a top South African retailer modernise its systems and grow its user numbers
A leading South African retail group recently engaged Codehesion to modernise one of its customer-facing digital platforms to improve delivery speed, enhance platform stability, and build a firm foundation for further expansion.
After Codehesion conducted its initial assessment, it found numerous issues that the retail group had been unaware of, making the project more extensive than initially thought.
The digital platform had been developed by a previous technology provider and carried substantial technical debt, limited documentation, and no meaningful automated testing.
Additionally, multiple security, compliance, and ownership risks were present, with certain critical services remaining dependent on infrastructure controlled by the previous provider.
These problems had degraded the customer experience for South Africans using the retail group’s digital platforms, resulting in substantial reputational damage to the retailer’s brand.
These extensive issues would normally require a total rebuild and a halt to current development plans, but Codehesion took a different approach.
Codehesion’s strategy
Codehesion’s approach to the problem was to deliver both the rebuild and the development of new systems simultaneously, rather than delaying development to focus on resolving the problem first.
The process was simple: Codehesion’s development team worked on the requested new systems, but whenever they encountered an issue, they separately took the time to upgrade it.
Thanks to this multi-faceted strategy, new customer-facing and commercially-focused functions continued to be developed at the same time that underlying system issues were steadily resolved.
After four months of development, the new systems had successfully been launched, and the team was able to focus its full attention on the remaining modernisation requirements.
This included removing legacy access and unnecessary compliance exposure, migrating third-party dependencies to client-controlled infrastructure, and restructuring backend services to include automated testing, improved control, and better technical documentation.
Thanks to Codehesion’s strategy, which caused minimal disruption to business operations, the retail group experienced substantial growth in its subscriber base, which more than tripled following the implementation.
Additionally, the new platform provided enhanced digital capabilities, including an insurance interface that has facilitated the sale of thousands of policies.
Long-term partners
The excellent results of this project have led to a strong relationship between Codehesion and the retail group, including numerous follow-up projects.
This included two digital products, one of which has since processed hundreds of thousands of transactions, while the other achieved a 95% internal code-quality rating, compared with 40.5% for the platform originally inherited.
This is proof that Codehesion is a top choice for South African companies with legacy systems or those needing new digital platforms.
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