Daily uploading Air Miles to the SAP environment is a thing of the past

Use your Air Miles right away or check your balance in real time? By using an API platform, this is now the reality for Air Miles, part of Loyalty Management Netherlands (LMN). With a go-native migration to the Cloud, TeamValue has built a solution that is secure, reliable and scalable. With a significant cost reduction, a robust architecture and a huge performance improvement, LMN is ready for the future. We discussed the project and the way to it with Joost-Jan, Azure Solution Architect at TeamValue.

Air Miles, the best-known loyalty program in the Netherlands. Earn points with companies such as Booking.com, Shell, Mastercard, Praxis and Albert Heijn. With over 3.3 million users, Air Miles is the largest savings program in the Netherlands.

The result:

Bringing the real-time API platform live, the following results were achieved:

1. (Currently) 1.5 million requests per day, of which > 95% were processed within 500ms.
2. 100% of the savings transactions are successfully processed to the SAP platform.
3. The platform, including the 15 APIs, has a proven uptime of 99.9%.
4. Savings transactions are processed in real time, so that savers can redeem their Air Miles immediately.
5. A safe, standardized and market-based connection for partners. With an Azure Secure Score of > 90%, the platform scores many times higher than the market average of approximately 80% in terms of security.
6. Because all operational actions on the platform are automated, partners can be onboard and start connecting their applications to the platform within five minutes.
7. By setting up a multi-tenant SaaS architecture that uses scalable (serverless) Azure services, fixed costs have fallen considerably. More is only paid when the 'load' on the platform increases.
8. Finally, the LMN team is trained in such a way that they can maintain the platform properly and solve the most common errors themselves.

Where previously, savings partners had to upload Air Miles daily to LMN's central SAP environment, that's a thing of the past with the new API platform. TeamValue developed this solution together with the LMN team. And successfully. The Air Miles are now credited and deducted in real time and it is possible to view the current status of your balance at any time of the day.

The development towards a real-time environment was not without a hitch. Unfortunately, LMN's regular IT partner and first developer of the API platform was unable to complete the project successfully, which is why LMN called in TeamValue.

The challenge for TeamValue was based on the previously developed and unsuccessful API platform where:

• The 'single-tenant' platform was rolled out for each partner. This led to high costs, as each partner had its own hardware, infrastructure and maintenance costs. The more partners, the higher the costs eventually became.
• Management complexity and costs increased enormously due to the container-based architecture.
• LMN was heavily dependent on hiring external specialists to manage the container platforms. This was not technically desirable, both cost and organization.
• The performance was substandard, due to the use of containers. Every request that came in had a negative impact on performance. Even with little 'load' on the platform, signals to partners did not come through.
• Abuse with identities and partners was made possible by the unwatertight authentication and authorization mechanism. The security of the platform was insufficient.
• Finally, LMN was not kept informed about the progress, development and (design) decisions that were made.

In response to these findings, LMN approached TeamValue to carry out an assessment — based on the current situation — and challenge the existing solution in terms of costs, performance and security. As a result of the assessment, LMN decided to give TeamValue the confidence to roll out the project and deliver it successfully.

Joost-Jan: In two months, the team was able to set up a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) platform using scalable Cloud-Native Azure solutions.

Transition from current architecture to new target architecture in the Cloud

Joost-Jan: “First of all, we put together a BizDevOps team for this project. This included a Product Owner with a number of functional and operational specialists from LMN, combined with my role as Azure Solutions Architect and a TeamValue Cloud Solution Developer.”

“The first step was to set up a new target architecture. Based on this architecture, we were able to develop a plan that allowed us to migrate the links from the current architecture to the new target architecture in the Cloud. The next step was to prepare the backlog and log all features and capabilities for the platform to be developed. With the desired end goal in mind, we then prioritized the backlog and divided it into short iterations (one-week sprints). Why did we choose this? To gain trust with our stakeholders and deliver value to the organization right from day one. In addition, LMN's Product Owner was also at the wheel for a full view of its development and deployment. 100% transparent. Exactly what we love.” In two months, the BizDevOps team was able to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) platform using scalable Cloud-Native Azure solutions. The goal of the MVP was to realize the capability to retrieve a saver's balance in real time. With this development, the first partner was given the opportunity to make adjustments to its IT infrastructure and to connect to the new platform.

In the six months that followed, the platform was fully rolled out and all desired functionalities were developed and put into production. All savings partners are now connected to the platform and are able to issue Air Miles in real time.