Gecko Dynamics

Event management software called 123Signup is a complex SaaS system serving two main purposes – event management and membership plan management. The platform is currently serving numbers of various entities and organizations such as private companies, event organizers universities, local governments as well as NGOs and non-profit organizations and is recognized as one of the market leaders in the area of event management software.
 

• Duration: July 2015 – Ongoing
• Technologies used: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Bootstrap, Jquery, Oracle DB
• Client’s country: United States

The owner of the product reached out to us asking to take over the project after another company which failed to deliver satisfying results in terms of quality and deadlines. The very first version of the platform was developed a long time before that and was already one of the recognizable products in its industry at that time and . Therefore, there was a lot of legacy code that we had to take over and rewrite or refactor. The project also came with a lot of legacy technologies and frameworks, which also had to be rewritten into the modern stack.

Since there was a huge piece of legacy code, it was a natural step to start with extensive and thorough code audit. As a result, there were identified issues and parts of the system to be refactored or coded from scratch, which were later on prioritized. In the course of code refactoring, we also developed many brand new modules as well as redesigned the existing ones, both in terms of modern UI and optimizing the existing logic and processes.

The system and its main modules was rewritten into modern stack, after which we continued to work with other legacy modules and develop the new ones. At the same time, we were also providing the maintenance, support, DevOps and database administration services.

To sum up, we provided all the services listed above, working at every single bit of the system which includes:

• Event management – highly sophisticated and advanced module covering all aspects of event management. That being said, everything from creating, through scheduling and calendars, to complex overview of participants and their management.
• Membership management – enabling membership management to various entities using 123Signup as a SaaS platform. The module enables to create membership programs of various kind by admins and sell them to the users.
• Donations module, which enables the users to make a donation for chosen entities, as well as creating ad banners in the web that redirects the potential donators to the donation module
• Extensive reporting of various data and information gathered across the system
• Website-builder enabling associations using the platform to create their own website through visual builder basing on predefined templates
• Member directory, allowing members to search for other members and see their connotations with the organizations they are participating in
• Online purchases of subscription plans (event / membership management)
• Extensive billing module
• Various roles of admins and users, enabled for the platform customers
• 3rd party services integration
• Payment gateways integration, e.g. CSI Pay, PayPal
• We also created an API for external entities serving various purposes, for example signing up for event from the external source, member authentication in external platforms, and more.
• Admin area to manage the clients and their plans

Volo is a complex system working as a fitness club & gym management software. Currently it’s one of the leading SaaS products for web-based billing and scheduling among fitness club owners across Canada and US.

• Duration: 2007 – Ongoing
• Technologies used: Tomcat, Java, JSP, Postgres Database, React
• Client’s country: Canada

Volo Innovations was a startup based out of Vancouver, created by Nikki and Barry Layton in 2007 who at the time were gym owners looking for a solution to manage their gym and its operations. Since they could not find anything on the market that would satisfy their needs, they decided to create a custom SaaS application for themselves and other gym owners.

Gecko Dynamics helped Volo Innovations by developing a whole product (called by itself Volo) from scratch and maintaining its further development & support. Over the next years, Volo became a successful product and one of the leading applications for gym management in US and Canada.

System functionality includes:

• Scheduling – integrated scheduling and billing modules automatically tracks all sessions to customers’ accounts and to payroll
• Billing & invoicing – Volo makes invoicing system easier and quicker, adding purchases, cancellations, and membership fees to member accounts automatically, allowing to issue an accurate invoice within seconds.
• Integration with various billing systems
  • Marketing – automated marketing modules including newsletters and other user-interactions tools, reaching existing members, as well as prospective clients.
  • Reporting – complex analytical tools allows you to instantly access relevant business reports to manage the growth of your business, identifying revenue opportunities, staff demand, the number of new memberships, and much more.
  • Member Portal – members can manage their own schedules and appoint classes with trainers, as well as pay for it and purchase products being sold at gyms
    • ERP sub-system
    • Hardware integration – automatic locks, entrance gates, membership cards
    • Importing data from integrated hardware to track members’ behaviors
    • Staff management
    • Much more

Jive is a complex business process management software serving a major role in everyday cycles of CamTran – Canada’s leading manufacturer of oil-filled transformers.

• Duration: 2012 – Ongoing
• Technologies used: Tomcat, Java, JSP, Postgres Database, React.js
• Client’s country: Canada

CamTran is a Canadian company (ISO-9001 certified), which specializes in manufacturing various kinds of oil-filled transformers and in their repair & renewal. Since 1982, it secured its position as Canada’s largest company with full-line distribution of oil filled transformers and is a constant marked leader in the fields of product quality, design & innovations. Having 3 locations in Canada, company owns a total surface of over 250,000 square meters of manufacturing space.

In 2012, Gecko Dynamics won a tender for delivery of a custom business process management software to improve CamTran’s business & manufacturing processes. The main part was focused around creating, storing, organizing, searching, viewing, editing, and controlling Standardized Work Instructions. The project was initially treated as a pilot project but was envisioned to grow and implement a larger custom software facilitating optimization of CamTran’s business processes, internally called Jive.

Results of the pilot phase led to maintaining a long terms cooperation, during which Gecko Dynamics has delivered a system than includes:

• Instant access to all projects, KPI’s and critical customer information
• Jobs management including specifications, drawings, time standards and completion checklists
• Project & Issue management with workflow from origination to resolution
• Document management
• Production and financial forecasting Internal audits
• Winding schedule optimization

Kofein is a SaaS platform developed for major Ukrainian restaurant chain. It's a complex and complete solution for purpose of management of restaurant chain, as well as singe restaurant. It covers literally all aspects of restaurant management - from resources, through staff, salaries, accounting & invoincing to POS terminals and tablet app for waiters.

Duration: 2013 – Ongoing
Technologies used: Java, Postgres, JavaScript, Android
Client's country: Ukraine

Sample modules it includes are:

• Inventory

Management:

• Real-time resource management - e.g. when someone orders a coffee, the system automatically reduces the amount of coffee available in the restaurant and notifies when it drops below 10%
• Accounting & invocing module
• Complete and advanced analytics, reports
• Staff management, salary calculations
• Electronic security and automatic locks
• Software for POS terminals
• Panel for cookers - displaying the orders on monitor located in the kitchen
• Tablet app for waiters enabling them to take orders and send it electronically to the kitchen
• Integration with various billing systems, payment gateways, external platforms and APIs

A brand-new platform brought to the market by Spectrum Wellness – Ireland’s leading company in providing employee-tailored health & wellness plans to medium & big enterprises in Ireland. The platform aim is to provide clearer overview of the purchased plans to its clients and partnered companies, as well as to enhance their management by consolidating all information in one place.  
 

• Duration: 2018 – ongoing
• Technologies used: PHP, Yii2, Javascript, Vue.js, Html, CSS
• Client’s country: Dublin, Ireland

Spectrum Wellness reached out to Gecko Dynamics seeking an urgent action on developing the frontend part of their brand new platform, which was scheduled to hit the market by the end of 2018. That happened, because Spectrum realised, that the in-house development team is out of its capacity and will not manage to release the complete product by the end of the year, and therefore needed an urgent help with getting the things delivered, as the whole marketing campaign was landing at the same time.

Gecko Dynamics took up the challenge and has worked closely with Spectrum Wellness development team on a frontend part to help delivering the product within the required time. Gecko Dynamics team was set to work closely with Spectrum in-house development team on the frontend part of the application.

Therefore, there were 2 teams in 2 locations working on the same product, which required strong communication between the teams and properly distributed scope of work to both teams. It is worth mention, that both teams were working under pressure of fixed deadline and the work was necessary to progress within the requested pace.

TekeTeke is an m-commerce digital ecosystem for focused on online shopping and delivery in Nairobi, Kenya, developed for the Kenyan enterprise Greenskies Investment as another project in their investment portfolio.
 

• Duration: February 2018 – May 2018
• Technologies used: Java for Android, Swift, PHP
• Client’s country: Kenya

We took over the development of this project on demand of the client, after previous software development company failed to deliver the project within the desired timeframe, cost and quality. The product couldn’t be deployed to the market because of flawful application and our job was to bring the originally desired quality and make it running flawlessly. What is important to mention, while other companies contacted by the client were advising to develop the app from scratch with higher cost, Gecko Dynamics was the only one capable of working on the provided source code and refactor it instead of coding from scratch.
 

We started with thorough code audit to identify the areas for improvement and grouped them in various priority categories to give the client an overview of which improvements are critical and most urgent before deploying the app on the market and which can wait for later. After the code review, the client asked us to proceed with our findings which ended up in performing multiple tasks and improvements in mobile, backend & frontend parts of the system consisting of 4 main areas:

Native mobile application for iOS & Android for regular users (buyers):

• Browsing for various shops and their products basing text search and products categories (food, clothes, electric products, beauty shops, sports, etc.). Sellers are the physical shops located in across Nairobi, Kenya.
• Making the purchases choosing from products available in the shop
• Paying via integrated mobile payment gateways that are specific and well-known in Africa, such as M-Pesa and Pesapal
• Setting the delivery address
• Signing up with email or Facebook, creating user profile
• Showing orders history
• Ability to use promo codes to get the discounts
• Livechat with the app’s support consultants

Native mobile application for Android for the deliverers:

• Registering with email
• Getting the notifications about products ordered by the user and delivery address
• Navigating to the delivery address
• Livechat with support consultants

Web app for shops and sellers – separated from the main admin panel:

• Registering the shop, creating its profile and adding the products
• Managing the orders and their history
• Basic statistics and reporting

Admin panel for super-admins and call-center employees:

• Ability to manage the registered shops database (block, remove, etc.) and viewing their data, such as products and orders history
• Chatting with users and deliverers
• Statistics and reporting
• Overview of the registered users and deliverers with ability to manage them (block, remove, etc.)
• Adding new admins to the systems

Enterprise League is a London-based startup providing a social-business platform with purpose to connect businesses around the world in a professional way, basing on their industries and specialization. The mission of the platform is to help businesses find a relevant business partner basing on their current business needs.

• Duration: March 2018 - ongoing
• Technologies used: Java, Spring, Hibernate, Javascript, React.js, AWS, Kubernetes
• Client’s country: London, UK

The client, which is a London-based startup, contacted us in early February 2018 looking for software house to take a full care of their new startup. What they had, was a concept of a social platform working as a web app on which companies can look for other companies to do business with. What the client needed, was a company that will provide an end-to-end process, starting from workshops and business analysis, through UX wireframing and design, to software development, QA and maintenance. What we are particularly proud of, is that the client has chosen Gecko Dynamics out of over 20 companies they contacted.

Given the requirements for the platform, Gecko Dynamics started with thorough business & technical analysis of the platform requirements by conducting the Workshops together with the client. As a result of intensive brainstorming meetings conducted with the client’s team over 3 days, the exact scope has been agreed, followed by UX mockups and Specification of Development. As a next step, both teams worked closely on creating the appealing UI design. Having that part accomplished, the team commenced software development process in the Agile process, dividing the whole scope into 2-week sprints, with QA process happening in parallel.

In the end, we created the whole platform, which functionalities include:

• Setting up an extensive profile of your company, including detailed information about its business and what it offers
• Newsfeed with ability to add posts including photos, videos and embedded links, as well as comment posts of other companies
• Matching screen, proposing the most relevant business partners by matching algorithm basing on your company information
• Chats and conversations between users
• Displaying the profiles of other companies
• Help form
• Integration with several 3rd party services & APIs
• Admin panel allowing the product owners to moderate the content of the app as well as manage the registered companies

Services provided:

• Workshops – Business Analysis & Technical Analysis
• UX prototyping
• UI design
• Software development – Java development, React.js development
• QA & testing
• Project Management

Rubica Survey Builder is a custom survey creator developed for Rubica – British Change Management company to support one of their key business goals which is measuring various aspects of change management by surveying the staff.

• Duration: March 2018 - November 2018
• Technologies used: Java, React.js
• Client’s country: United Kingdom

Rubica Change & Analytics Ltd. is a British company which primary expertise is conducting the change management across the companies, measuring the impact they create and leading the further development basing on the received results. Rubica needed a tool that will optimize one of their main business processes related to the change management expertise, which is surveying the employees of their clients on various aspects of their work life and assessing the correct conclusions.

Gecko Dynamics developed a surveying tool allowing Rubica to create custom surveys with various types of questions and basing on multiple custom design layouts. The system has been launched shortly after the development successfully conducting the first surveys with multiple clients and providing Rubica robust statistics allowing to evaluate the data and assess the correct conclusions.

Utopian Hotel Collection is a platform enabling users to book their stays in luxury hotels grouped by the highest rankings of standards.

Duration: April 2018 - August 2018
Client's country: United Kingdom
Technologies used: Javascript, Angular, C#, .NET

The client reached out to us after the previous dev company failed to deliver in terms of quality and deadline, which makes it a legacy project. In particular, the client complained about the slowly working website and constant crashes, as well as layout full of bugs. At a glance it may not sound as a very unique situation, but in the addition the client decided to set up his own development team and needed a company that will refactor the whole application, repair it, implement outstanding features and prepare it for the upcoming team who were meant to kick off from September 2018.

Therefore, our job was to not only finish what the previous team failed to deliver, but also to prepare the application and its code in a way that will make it easy for the new team to start working with it. We started with thorough analysis of the current technological situation and code audit, which discovered a lot of inconsistencies and errors in the code and overall architecture, which were causing constant crashes and were also slowing down the site. Following the audit results, we had to refactor the major part of the application, implement the outstanding features, prepare everything for the new team and conduct a step-by-step handover.