Case Study: VanHelper
What is VanHelper
VanHelper is an automated system that allows customers to find, compare and book House Removal companies in the UK.
Tackling an age-old problem
Over 90% of prices made for a house removal service in the UK requires a human estimated quote, mainly due to the many factors that may affect a home move, but also because the issues with dead-mileage where a vehicle may have an empty leg back from a drop off location.
VanHelper was envisioned to be a fully automated system to assist in the daily administration of the business that handles booking acquisition and booking management for a removal service.
The targeted industry is mainly small to medium-sized domestic home removal and man & van businesses that would like to expand their presence online.
The solution created was a “no-lose” proposition whereby a specific charge is only taken from confirmed bookings with full control of pricing in the hands of the businesses that sign up.
Polsino Tech approached this issue through management configurations that allow the businesses to define what types of bookings they would like to receive, this means that the system should not be imposing bookings on businesses but rather match job requests with corresponding businesses immediately.
Analysis
We first approached the project by creating a businesses case together with VanHelper around the businesses feasibility, this involved us taking a structured approach to the project first by confirming that the home removals market in the United Kingdom is worth £1 billion per year, then by confirming that smaller moves are usually done by individuals, once individuals have larger items which require moving such as fridges or large beds or the property size goes beyond 2-3 bedroom properties, that is where the house and flat removals service shine.
The premise of the project required removal businesses that sign up to set their own prices hence the multiple data points were created to record this factor, Polsino Tech advised the use of time as a calculating factor for the price as bookings are usually done in hourly or half-hourly increments.
Further to this, a full mapping system based on postcodes was created for the businesses that sign up so that removal services can define their catchment area based on the postcode system of the UK
A business canvas model and business process model was created together with VanHelper to clearly explain in plain detail how the business will work and how the system integrates with all aspects of the business in order to create the development tasks required for VanHelper.
Breaking down the system
Quoting
Everything starts with the removal quote, the business is asked to provide a series of data points so for their charges, these are in turn used to calculate the duration of a move based on principles such as driving time and loading time.
Booking management
VanHelper can help manage booking availability and takes into account time required between each booking to make the most out of a driver’s day, with this data the system is able to avoid double-booking resources such as vehicles and driver/helpers for a house move.
Payments
Payments integration was not a large concern for the client, therefore Polsino Tech opted to provide full integration of PayPal payments for VanHelper, we chose PayPal because it is a trusted name for online e-commerce sites and also it provides protection from PCI compliance for the system, both PayPal and Credit/Debit cards is accepted by the implementation.
Control of jobs
This is achieved through the combination of the catchment area, distance travelled and types of bookings configuration, the client wanted to ensure that VanHelper only matches businesses that are relevant to the job criteria of the house move.
Notifications
To provide assurances to the customer and businesses, SMS and Email notifications can be sent out to the businesses, customers and even the drivers/helpers for a particular booking, to allow businesses to operate in a fully autonomous way.
Cancellations
Cancellations are handled through customer interaction of the booking details directly on the VaHelper system, this is because the client wanted to provide a secure way of managing a booking, and that the latest information would always be on the system for the customer to review in scenarios where an email is misplaced or lost by the customer.
Resource management
The client wanted to tackle the problem with the allocation of resources between vehicles, drivers, helpers, and time. The system design is based around orchestrating these resources between booking time and driving time, therefore optimising between bookings for maximum utility and preventing double booking.
External bookings management
VanHelper is well aware that other sources of the booking will come in and therefore tasked us to create a separate external bookings system which allows businesses to enter their booking information for jobs acquired outside of VanHelper if they wish to take advantage of the advance booking management system.
Technical Analysis
Once we had a clear view of the business requirements and clients’ expectations, we started looking into the technical aspects of the project. We quickly came to a conclusion that due to a great number of customisation and relatively complex process of booking independent resources, the project does not follow simple ‘book a table’ rules.
In order to achieve a system that fulfils all of the defined requirements and delivers outstanding performance, we decided to implement it from scratch, instead of trying to customise some existing e-commerce platform, which in our experience, consumes much more time and effort to implement. On top of that, such projects tend to be error-prone in the long run due to a vast number of customisation and require a lot of attention when the underlying platform evolves over time, which greatly increases the cost of maintaining the project.
Having direct access and being able to modify the smallest parts of the source code, allows us to easily fine-tune and adjust different parts of the implementation accordingly to projects’ ongoing requirements.
Implementation – Technical
Our development team took MVP incremental development approach to the project, this is to ensure that a product can be pushed out to the market to gather user feedback as early as possible, Polsino Tech is capable of running projects in both Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban as well as Waterfall approach if required.
For VanHelper we opted for an Agile Scrum approach, the team broke down the development items in order of priority and business value before prioritising them into a backlog and developing the items.
Implementation – Infrastructure
As part of Polsino Tech’s offering, we provide hosting and infrastructure design to fulfil the requirements of the business.
VanHelper is hosted on AWS and sits behind a load balancer which can distribute the load between multiple servers, the resources are cached on a CDN and for security purposes, HTTPS is enforced.
Both the DNS and SSL certificates were procured by Polsino Tech on behalf of VanHelper.
Implementation - Design
Our initial wireframe prototypes were created in a tool such as Figma, new tools allowed collaboration between the client and our design team to discuss updates changes and feedback immediately through the web interface of Figma.
In turn, these designs were realised by our designers through Adobe suites items, our designers worked closely with our developers in order to create a responsive mobile-first design for the application, to ensure that the application can work on all channels.
A specific choice was made on the use of SVGs as much as possible to ensure that the website front end is scalable and resizable, all resources created were handed over to the client where possible.
Testing
Polsino Tech approaches testing is with 3 pillars, Technical testing, Functionality testing, Infrastructure testing.
With VanHelper we were asked to proceed with a lean approach to testing, with a focus specifically on functionality testing using both manual and automation methods.
On the infrastructure we had to limit access and create a scalable environment which was achieved through AWS hosting and load balancing, allowing the application to take on traffic in a project with VanHelper’s projected users, testing was done through small scale load balancing tests to ensure that the application continues to function on load.
Customer-driven improvements
Polsino Tech advised VanHelper to listen to customer feedback for future functionality proposals.
VanHelper went live to customers during the height of the UK Lockdown and COVID pandemic, this meant that the forecast numbers for traffic and bookings were severely impacted, however, the client was willing to take this as an opportunity to go to the businesses that have signed up and asked for feedback so that improvements can be made to the website.
This worked well for our development team as we were used to delivering items in an Agile Scrum way and our businesses and technical analysts assisted the client in shaping the stories and guiding the client into creating a sizable backlog for future features.
Analytics
The client had not planned for analytics for the system originally but with our guidance as part of the project, Polsino Tech implemented Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to the website with full events based on user interaction.
Without analytics, it was impossible for VanHelper’s management to see customer interactions on the website and provide meaningful reports for return of investment in the developmental changes.
Furthermore, this was integrated seamlessly with VanHelper’s advertising and PPC campaigns which were instrumental in driving business decisions within the client’s business.
Postscript
What sets Polsino Tech apart from the plethora of companies on the market is that we are not just limited on providing out of the box industry solutions for your needs, we also the capability and know-how in delivering bespoke systems tailored to your needs.
VanHelper is one such project, as a newcomer to the domestic removals market, it wants to take a different approach than the established competition in connecting customers with businesses, allowing customers to compare quotes that are fair for studio moves, 1-4 bedroom house and flat moves and beyond. Home removals is a tricky business to get in to and we are happy to have been a partner to this project.
We don’t want to be your supplier for a project, we want to be your trusted partner. When we embark on a project together we will be there as your technical partner and truly take your interest at heart, when you choose Polsino Tech it is about the long-term partnership we can build together, and in this world of rapid changes this is exactly what you need, a trusted technical partner to help you and your businesses achieve your vision.