Development of a Modular Promotion and Proposal Management System for Retail Digital Transformation

Retail

Challenges Faced by Retailers in Managing Promotions and Sales Proposals

The client relies on legacy desktop applications and manual processes to manage promotions and sales proposals, which hampered their ability to scale, adapt quickly to market demands, and accelerate their digital transformation. The existing systems lacked flexibility, efficiency, and integration capabilities required for rapid multi-market deployment.

About the Client

A large retail organization operating multiple brands across various markets, aiming to modernize and automate promotion and sales proposal workflows to enhance efficiency and scalability.

Goals for Developing a Next-Generation Promotion and Proposal Management Platform

Implement a scalable microservices-based architecture to facilitate flexible deployment and easy scaling across multiple markets.
Automate manual promotional workflows to reduce manual effort and improve process turnaround times.
Develop integrated systems that unify promotion management and proposal creation to streamline operations.
Enable quick and easy creation, editing, and management of promotions and proposals with real-time KPIs.
Support integration with numerous internal and third-party services for comprehensive process automation.
Ensure high system quality and performance with automated testing, continuous integration, and deployment pipelines.

Core Functional Capabilities for the Promotion & Proposal Management System

Unified promotion management interface for creating, editing, deleting, and viewing promotion details.
Proposal creation and management module including validation, rejection, editing, and notifications.
End-to-end automation of promotional processes from proposal submission to approval and publication.
Dashboard views with KPIs such as sales volume, effectiveness, and proposal statuses.
Integration with over ten internal and external services for data synchronization and operational alignment.
Automated quality control through CI/CD pipelines, API and UI automation testing, and performance testing tools.
Environment configuration following best practices for development, staging, and production deployment.
Support for multi-language, multi-market scalability, facilitating rapid expansion into new geographic regions.

Preferred Technologies and Architectural Strategies

Microservices architecture for modularity and scalability

API-centric design driven by Domain Driven Design principles

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines

Containerization and orchestration (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes)

Automated testing frameworks for unit, UI, and performance testing

MariaDB or equivalent relational database for data storage

Java 11+ for backend services

External and Internal System Integrations Needed

Internal services for promotion and proposal data management
Third-party APIs for data validation and arbitration
Notification services for automated email alerts
Performance testing tools (e.g., JMeter) integrated into CI/CD pipelines
Analytics and KPI data sources

Critical Non-Functional System Requirements

System scalability to support increasing volume of promotion and proposal data across multiple markets
High availability and reliability to support peak sales periods such as Black Friday
Performance benchmarks minimizing delay in data processing and user interactions
Security measures for data privacy and compliance with relevant standards
Automated testing and quality assurance processes to meet defined quality standards

Projected Benefits and Business Outcomes from the New System

The implementation of a microservices-based promotion and proposal management platform is expected to significantly enhance business efficiency by automating workflows, reducing manual effort, and enabling rapid scaling across markets. The new system aims to improve promotion creation and management speed, support peak sales times seamlessly, and facilitate faster digital transformation, ultimately leading to increased agility and competitive advantage.