Our customer offers a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hotel software solution that seamlessly integrates property management, global distribution, bookings and marketing. Its clients are independent hoteliers, small hotel chains and hotel management companies.

In this SaaS, they can find property management systems, booking engines, channel management and reporting solutions. These features are all in a single location, which allows users to have greater control in managing hotels, distributing rooms online and performing other daily tasks.

The key features of the platform are:

• Property management system

• Commission-free booking engine

• Native GDS integration

• Revenue manager

• Credit card processing

• Data security

• Customizable reports

The challenge

Our client always:

• permanently improves the software quality

• continuously adds new features

• provides customization services.

For core product development as well as side projects, the company actively uses external services and remote engineers. This approach makes it possible to build new features and extend the platform much faster in reaction to market needs and clients’ enquiries.

While having offices in the US and India plus a couple of software development vendors across the globe, the customer still needed a strong partner who could provide high-quality services and a team of top-level engineers.

When the client contacted us, it was crucial for them to hire only senior software engineers who could work in one office.

The solution

At the beginning, with our team augmentation service, the client’s expertise was reinforced by mostly senior front-end engineers.

Later on, after a successful phase of UI development, the customer decided to extend the team with backend and QA engineers to build a more autonomous team in Ukraine.

At the start of our cooperation, Elitex team was managed by team leads on the client’s side. However, with its expansion, it was agreed that managerial roles would be defined on the ELITEX side as well, adding local team lead positions.

The ELITEX team is involved in:

• core product development

• frontend and backend development

• code clean-up

• Refactoring

• quality assurance (QA)

As it was important to maintain smooth communication with the customer’s USA office, our engineers shifted their work schedule to provide significant work time coverage with the client’s timezone. That allowed Skype meetings, emails and work chats within the same business day for both the Ukrainian and US sides.

Our engineers also support the client’s development team from Asia – helping to handle the parts of work, which requires higher expertise and broader knowledge, providing the technical review, as well as consultancy.
In the meantime, ELITEX is continuously looking for skilled Ukrainian engineers to extend the team. Within the hiring process, ELITEX is responsible for choosing the most suitable applicants, interviewing them and referencing the best candidates to the client, who makes the final decision.

The result

Working with ELITEX helped the customer to:

• Accelerate the development process;

• Extend the engineering department’s capacity;

• Significantly improve the code quality;

• Augment its engineering team’s expertise, especially in the UI;

• Build the right QA process.

Elitex continues to provide services to the customer and help to achieve its business goals.