Developing proprietary enterprise software

Digitising and transforming internal processes

Prime Property Management wanted help to digitise and streamline their internal processes, in order to improve efficiency and productivity. Having worked with the Prime PM team closely on other projects, we had a deep understanding of their typical workflow and desired outcomes. Together we investigated the sticking points of daily tasks, and how we could create the tools to get things moving.

A unified approach

From our insights it was clear that Prime PM needed several tools to efficiently complete their daily tasks. We created a platform that would house all of them in a systematic and unified approach. That allowed us to keep everything consistent within the framework.

During several creative worshops and ideation experiments, we specified user flows to ensure minimal friction and a better user experience for the team.

We developed a UI style based from their brand guidelines, applying global design principles across all tools. The familiarity of UI patterns, dashboards and consistent style creates ease of user navigation and increases usage, whist minimising the need for training and documentation.

Software development

As there was significant overlap of features that the various tools needed, the decision was made to separate the structure into a Web Components frontend, which communicates via REST API to a backend powered by FastAPI. This has made it easy to adjust business logic when required by Prime, and gives us the flexibility to change frontends as technology evolves.

The user interface was styled with the framework Tailwind CSS. We customised the CSS framework into a well-engineered design system for the platform. When Tailwind compiles it automatically removes all unused CSS, which means the final CSS bundle is very small, making this platform super fast to use.

Key technical features and advantages

A key feature of the tools was integrating with weasyprint to create branded pdf’s on the fly with the right information in, and automating these so they get sent out to clients straight from the system with branded email templates. We also utilise the Royal Mail Address Now lookup API, for finding full and accurate address details as needed.

To make provisioning and software updates easier we opted to provision the services via Jenkins running on AWS EC2.

Future software platform growth

Software within enterprise needs to respond, adapt and grow to meet business needs. Since launching the platform we have doubled the number of tools with additional features added when required. This platform is ever evolving and will keep expanding to meet the demands of Prime Property Management, helping them to continue to prosper and thrive.