Technical Integration Owner - Flipkart
Owner of integration and product development of in-house SaaS based WMS application with Flipkart ERP. SPOC for external and internal stakeholders.
The Context
Situation
Flipkart e-commerce got into an agreement to store their inventory of televisions in the company's warehouses. The inventory would be managed by the company's operations team using the in-house WMS. Deep integration needs to be done between Flipkart systems and the WMS so that customer orders can be pulled and processed by the operations team and delivered by the company's logistics arm. I owned the end-to-end technical integration and all the product features that were required to be built to fulfil the client's business requirements. The operations needed to start in time for Flipkart's 'Big Billion Days' sale event held across the country.
The Approach
Insight
Integration pipeline setup between the client's APIs and the WMS integration layer (JAVA based), which would transform the client API payload to the core product payload (and vice versa).
Integration Type - API
Transaction Mode - JSON payload
Integration Mode - API Gateway
Integration Monitoring Application - AWS CloudWatch
Host - AWS
Goals
Being the sole technical owner of the account for Amazon, my goals included the following:
• Project manage all change requests/new enhancements pertaining to the integration and the WMS product
• Integration and product support for in-house operations teams
• Manage system failures by debugging issues, reporting and getting them fixed by the respective tech owners
• Collaborate with internal Product and tech teams to build any new features in the core product while making sure other client integrations are not impacted
Navigation
I collaborated closely with the client's tech team to define the API structures and requirements.
• Integration achieved in a record four months time
• Lead migration of integration and feature parity during WMS version upgrade
• Trained the warehouse operations team on the new process flows built for the integration
• Own and project manage all feature requests, UAT sign-off, production release and post-production support
The Results
Achievement
The integration, both functional and non-functional, was achieved in a record time of four months from requirement gathering to testing and production deployment. The operations started with four warehouses and expanded to a further six post the sale event. The four day sale event was completed with no integration errors.
Learnings
Clear requirements from the beginning results in a bug free product. The APIs to be integrated for this project were clearly documented and tested before the development began.