What we did

Informed simplicity to avoid waste

Despite lots of moving parts to get to grips with, DiUS’ focus from landing on the ground to delivering key features has always been to implement lean practices and principles that allow QuiteLike to maximise value while minimising effort and complexity. To begin with, this meant taking a step back to identify where improvements could be made from an operational point of view before recommending and building the right solutions.

For example, there was an opportunity to standardise and automate the creation and production of recipe cards. DiUS adopted a best-of-breed approach by introducing a headless content management system – Sanity – to complement the strengths of QuiteLike’s existing ERP system and neutralise its weaknesses. Sanity was identified early on to not only serve as the framework for the finished product, but also as a working prototyping tool to iterate our way to a great outcome for the recipes team. High-frequency, at times daily, collaboration sessions with the culinary team, which focused on the authoring prototype, enabled us to iteratively co-design a lowest possible effort solution that addressed the team’s most critical paint points. At the click of a button, Sanity would convert recipe information into a PDF ready for printing. This automation significantly reduced the manual effort previously required and eliminated the need for a dedicated designer to reformat content based on new changes. As part of this, DiUS built a reusable API that collected and managed data from various sources, which could be used for recipe card creation but also in other parts of the business such as e-commerce.

Another significant challenge QuiteLike faced was understanding and analysing the financial implications of creating recipes, specifically around the cost of ingredients and calculating GST. To provide more visibility, DiUS built a data lake and created pipelines that would integrate into QuiteLike’s existing tools, particularly Power BI. This allowed for real-time tracking of ingredient costs to make more informed decisions and help manage expenses better. A rule-based algorithm was developed to make accurate GST calculations at the point of sale, ensuring compliance with tax regulations as well as delivering a detailed understanding of QuiteLike’s financial position.

DiUS also recognised an opportunity for technology to help different parts of the business talk to and learn from each other. QuiteLike’s e-commerce platform was gathering extremely valuable information during the order process, which would benefit its customer care team. Therefore, DiUS used event-driven architectures to pass this information on, leveraging AWS EventBridge to facilitate communication between microservices. This approach reduced dependencies on other teams and allowed for parallel development.

The latest feature DiUS has supported QuiteLike with, which promises to help the business grow faster and further, is enabling customers to change their preferred delivery day. Once again, DiUS emphasised a lean approach to avoid overengineering the solution. We started small to build the essential components first before gathering feedback and iterating accordingly. By slicing the problem into more manageable pieces, QuiteLike has been able to launch this major milestone and get it into the hands of customers quickly.

With this feature and every other stream of work, DiUS recognised the value that new ways of working, and the values that underpinned these ways of working, would add to the QuiteLike team. For example, optimising for accelerated speed-to-value and learning, maximising agility when solutioning through maximising optionality, optimising for smaller batch sizes, and frequent releasing by slicing the problem rather than slicing the solution. With weekly showcases and story mapping, we were able to foster transparency and collaboration between our team and QuiteLike stakeholders. By opening up these lines of communication, we have been able to align both internal teams and external vendors on the business’s goals.