Background

Sodexo, a Fortune 500 company, employing 420,000 people has two key business verticals:
Meal Vouchers & On site services and Sodexo has a leadership business in both these verticals

Over 1000 companies across the globe distribute Sodexo meal vouchers to their employees as a benefit which can be redeemed across the global merchant network of Sodexo. These vouchers are in paper format and are as valuable as currency, therefore they require a significant capital infrastructure to support the logistics and transaction management.

With majority of their users moving to mobile phones, it was imminent that Sodexo moved its voucher business from physical infrastructure towards digital. Given the criticality and scale of operations, they needed a partner they could trust to make this happen smoothly and successfully.

The Red Pandas

TheRedPandas started with gaining a thorough understanding of the business, nuances, dependencies and constraints. Its not always straightforward to build a new software product when you are working with an established business with live transactions.

The South East Asian Countries of Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines were selected as the launch countries and we went on to design a digital voucher system which would replace the paper based voucher business.

We ​started with onsite workshops to immerse ourselves in the business processes. Our team of business analysts mapped the existing business processes to digital interfaces and built rapid prototypes to simulate the new business flows. Once we were confident that the new processes covered all business scenarios we set out a development roadmap.

Our architecture team evaluated the best engineering approach to adopt mindful of the scale at which the business would operate and we setup a cross functional team to engineer the technology suite comprising of server side applications such as the transaction and reconciliation platform, payment platforms, web applications with identity management for business workflows, mobile applications for end users to access vouchers and conduct transactions.

All of the above had to be built to accomodate the localisation needs of each country while running on a single platform.

We organised our scrum team, adopted best agile methodologies and delivered incremental software every week. This enabled the Sodexo team to see the most important features in action, early in the life cycle and allowed us to adjust our course based on real feedback.

While our engineering team delivered software, our dev ops team ensured the features were made available to our product owners immediately and our incrementally growing automated test suites gave us the confidence that we were building software which was assured to perform.

Impact

The product went live successfully in Indonesia in September 2015, followed by Philippines and Vietnam, with each country showcasing their own flavour of consumer facing applications powered by a single mobile transaction platform. Over the following months, the entire Sodexo user base was migrated to the digital voucher systems.

Our dedicated maintenance team ensured a smooth rollout as the product scaled. The success of the project led to a stronger partnership between Sodexo & TheRedPandas.

 Today TheRedPandas has built and maintains more than 4 large scale product deployments across multiple countries for both the business lines of Sodexo.