Practiv delivered project Mercury, a technology platform built with the best of breed Practiv patterns and processes in Google Cloud

Mercury has fundamentally improved the business, from customer service to information flow and operational efficiency

When you’ve done things a certain way for a long time, and they’ve worked, it can be hard to imagine rapid technology, process and business change.

TIL engaged Practiv’s Business Architecture team to discuss a journey that would see the company change technology in a well planned, considered manner, that would see the company offer industry leading customer experiences while continuing to do what they do well.

Mercury started life as a customer facing portal, and soon delivered tight integration into the company’s Transport Management System, replacing inefficient parts of it day by day, while allowing hundreds of thousands of shipments to keep flowing without down time. Here’s how we delivered:

Business Insight

• Project Methodology — We were able to take a first class product approach to the Mercury project, using contemporary software development tools to capture and prioritise the needs of an established transport company
• Business Objectives — The customer’s user-stories were triaged, stakeholder perspectives documented, prioritised and delivered based on “bang for buck”, and made significant impacts early in the project

Practiv Build

• Build Pipeline — We consistently deliver change to production multiple times a day, and have a weekly review with TIL to demo what has already been delivered. A great example of Practiv’s Continuous Integration, Testing and Delivery environments and patterns working at their best
• Teaming Arrangement — We dedicate team members to TIL on a long-term basis for consistent billing, domain expertise and delivery
• Software Delivery — Ultimately we deliver Mercury, the technology platform that has integrated TIL’s Transport Management System, CRM, ERP, fleet management and live vehicle location. This gives customers and staff fast access to the important information they need to run their business

Practiv Run

• Run Platform — Practiv’s enterprise-scale, containerised deployment model down to the operating system, providing isolation and independent management of each micro-service
• A Beautiful Technology Platform — Built entirely in Google Cloud, Mercury’s micro front-ends and back-ends take full advangage of Google Networking and Security, Kubernetes Engine, Pub/Sub, Storage, and Cloud SQL
• Long term support — 24x7 response to any change in application, container or server performance

We continue to change to the technology platform mulitple times a day, constantly improving the experience with zero down time.