A crucial requirement that determined the further fate of the project was that we had to set out the scope of our project in great detail. We had to analyse goals, capabilities and expectations very meticulously to enable full backlog refinement. Working at this level required the client to be highly involved in our cooperation. Fortunately, thanks to the open attitude of the team at Panek and the good communication between us, we were able to pull it off.
Building a Scalable Billing System in Under 8 Months for Panek Car Sharing
OUTCOMES
Results of partnership
Tariff modelling
Flexible tariff models do not need to be managed by IT staff, which reduces operating costs.
Billing algorithm
Business rules for context-based process orchestration.
“Continuous” calculation
Key element of the solution is its ability to work in a “continuous” cost calculation mode.
PROJECT
Genesis and business expectations
In July 2022, our client, Panek company, had a nearly finished billing system, which turned out to have not met its practical business demands after all. As a result, the client decided to create a new, comprehensive internal billing system from scratch.
The system had to work with existing solutions responsible for individual services (e.g. the carsharing system) and be easy to integrate with payment service providers and the client’s own financial and accounting system. The main challenge of the project was to keep up with the pace: the client had set aside just 8 months for this billing system to be built practically from scratch. If we had not relied on cloud-native AWS services, the deadline would have been impossible to meet.
PROJECT TIME
2022 – present
INDUSTRY
TSL
COUNTRY
Poland
SERVICES AND SOLUTIONS
TECHNOLOGIES
DynamoDB
Spring Boot
AWS SQS
Apache Kafka
Elasticsearch
Junit
Who have we helped?
Panek provides a carsharing service, which is an innovative way of travelling within the city: a special mobile app allows people to rent a nearby car per minute, per hour or per day. Users only pay for time and mileage, and don’t need to worry about any other fees. Today, Panek CarSharing has more than 2500 vehicles available throughout Poland.
Business challenges
Apart from the deadline, which meant the billing system had to be created in just eight months, the new solution was meant to support the client’s business strategy in terms of:
- Developing new business lines (e.g. bike rental, food delivery);
- International expansion (multi-currency billing);
- Building competitive advantage thanks to unique functionalities (“continuous” cost calculation).
ACTIONS
Project execution process
Given the tight deadline, the client expected advanced domain-specific knowledge and quick deployment.
Scope and delivery model
The client performed a business analysis and defined all their requirements as stories. We then set up a team of developers experienced in building billing systems and went on to develop solution architecture and the system in accordance with their requirements.
We worked on functionalities such as:
- Publishing pricelist information;
- Receiving and saving events;
- Charging payment elements;
- Publishing events;
- Core billing;
- API;
- Payment components;
- Documents;
- Communication with the accounting system;
- Currency exchange rates (integration with three providers).
The version we deployed could be described as an MVP+: since early April, the system has been deployed in production, integrated with a new car rental mobile app and the client’s accounting system. Our team continues to iron out the details, smooth out functionalities and add new elements.