Integrate with a third party system which is installed on premise in a retail environment with the aim of being able to notify customers of the state of the order, and its progress through the fulfilment process.
A lot of time and effort went into understanding the order fulfilment flow of the third party system and, crucially, at which point within the flow to integrate.
It was not as straightforward a 1:1 mapping of the third party’s events to what we would inform the customer, there was an element that a subset of customers would be informed of fulfilment progress. To achieve targeting the subset of customers, both systems needed to know about a common entity by way of a correlating identifier.
The project was not realised as there wasn’t a commercial drive to complete the integration.
Despite not being completed and released to production, the experience was invaluable in liaising with a third party, understanding each other, being exposed to how a different organisation operates, and the process of defining boundaries, interfaces, and responsibilities.