Tradeka is a Finnish cooperative with nearly M€500 turnover, making good things happen for its 210 000 members and for the surrounding society. Codemate is a digital partner for several Tradeka companies and the collaboration has been continuing and becoming closer over several years.
Tradeka wanted to renew its services for its most important target group, the members of the co-op. The traditional print and e-mail communication lacked interaction; how to engage the members and serve them better. Taking care of member related matters by the customer service staff was expensive to provide, so our task was to automate the ordinary membership related actions.
At the same time Tradeka introduced a new investment opportunity for its members and needed a modern and reliable way to manage the fund subscriptions.
To fulfil these needs, Tradeka created a new member portal, Oma Tradeka, in collaboration with Codemate.
Defining the goals
The big theme for the digital service was easiness of use so that customer service would be contacted as little as possible. This was a challenge due to the demographics of the target users, many of them being older people. The portal had to be reliable and work without a glitch to serve its purpose.
The R&D project was started with a planning and design phase, where the key user stories where defined
- Existing members register to the portal
- People can become members of Tradeka co-op
- Membership can be ended using the portal
- Members can manage their membership details
- Members can subscribe to the fund and view their investments
- Immediate access to member benefits
- Easy to use member benefits
One of the key success criteria was also to engage members to give feedback and make initiatives that could have positive impact in the society.
Based on these goals, Codemate’s team drafted a concept of a web portal, its user interface, technical solution and the development project itself.
Agile development
We wanted to plan the project and divide the work into sprints, so that we would be able to launch the first versions of the portal as early as possible. Further use-cases and features would be added as soon as they are ready.
The project was started in September 2018 and the portal was ready for its users in January 2019. The first version of the service enabled member registration and managing membership details. The next version featured membership benefits and a digital membership card. In February, when Tradeka opened its new profit-sharing fund for the members, Oma Tradeka was ready to support the fund subscriptions.
Success of the service, especially the fund, exceeded all expectations.
Technology
The team got freedom to choose the best technologies to implement the portal. The selection criteria were security, flexibility and scalability, speed of development and reliability of the system.
Tech stack
We chose a modern open source technology stack:
- Ruby on Rails for the back-end and the static front-end generation
- PostgreSQL relational database and Redis key-value database
- ActiveAdmin
- Cloud ja DevOps: AWS, ECS, Docker, CloudFront, Terraform
Integrations
Because Oma Tradeka is the single service for the members to access all member-related matters, we integrated the system with Lime CRM member register, Innovatics Oskari share register and OP Checkout payment service. Strong authentication was implemented using Signicat integration.
In software projects integrations are the most common reasons for failing to stay in the agreed timeline and budget. However, Codemate’s team was able to pull off all the integrations and keep the project in the agreed schedule. Yei!
Results
The goals were achieved brilliantly!
Members invested Millions of Euros in the profit-unit fund during the first months.
Customer service enquiries have decreased, freeing Tradeka’s employees work time for more productive things. Thousands of members have found Oma Tradeka service and the number of registered users grows every day.
Our common journey is still in the beginning, so that Oma Tradeka becomes the main service and influencing channel for all Tradeka members. This is the common goal for Codemate and Tradeka.
“Cooperation with Codemate went well and the service was delivered within the agreed schedule. All the functionality on our wish list did not fit the starting budget, but we were able to get a functioning service with all the critical features. During the design sprint we also defined new concrete solutions that contributed to the desired outcomes. Communication was frictionless and project management worked very well!”
Satu Niemelä
Head of CSR – Coop Tradeka
Want to learn more?
Miika has been working with Tradeka for quite some time and is always willing to co-operate.
