The Challenge

Shell Retail, like any other big corporation, is defined by complex (largely manual) processes, legacy infrastructure and architecture, and siloed teams. As such, they experience long development and time-to-market cycles, resulting in slow innovation pace and sub-optimal user experience.

Our Solution

Together with Shell, we built a scalable platform that speeds up the creation of microservices, which can accelerate their innovation efforts and strengthen their operational excellence.
Providing a robust foundation for future development, our microservices architecture is built around lightweight front- and backend modules, mediated by business-driven APIs. Each module facilitates rapid development and deployment, robust security and access control, and seamless integration with legacy systems. All modules are reusable and can be reconfigured, when needed. Hence, ensuring the decoupling of distribution channels from the firm’s product engines.

In addition, the communication amongst microservices is streamlined through gRPC, ensuring high-performance data exchange. Furthermore, to simplify the interactions between our and Shell B2B clients’ ecosystems, we built an external-facing microservice to act as a gateway. It exposes both REST and GraphQL APIs that manage the communication and provide a unified interface for clients.

Finally, we automated deployment processes and maintained code quality by utilising tools like GitHub Actions, linter, integration tests, and SonarQube. We also standartised our infrastructure deployment with Terraform, minimising configuration discrepancies and enhancing reliability across all environments.

The Impact

Operational Efficiency

Streamlined workflows and reduced manual intervention by over 99%, enhancing the speed and reliability of retail operations.

Scalability

Our approach enabled Shell to effortlessly scale its services in response to demand fluctuations and business growth.

Future-Proof Solutions

Our architecture's flexibility ensures that Shell's systems remain agile and adaptable, ready to incorporate future industry standards and best practices, as well as changes in business requirements.

Reusability

Treating frontend and backend modules as separate building blocks allows us to quickly build new solutions based on existing and emerging needs.

"The calibre of people at DEUS is the highest I have worked with in my career and it has been a truly refreshing and rewarding experience"

Cristina Gray

Program Manager, Shell

Benefits

Together with Shell, our interdisciplinary teams continuously developed different microservices built around lightweight front- and backend modules. This approach allowed us to:

Deliver solutions aligned with functional, technical, risk-related, business, and user requirements
Maintain brand consistency and user experience across the journey
Quickly combine modules to meet current and future business/users needs
Enable seamless integration and orchestration of existing (legacy) systems and processes
End-to-end solution testing to evaluate performance and impact on KPIs and OKRs
Monitor and log solution and team metrics to address bottlenecks, such as time to market

Cost Efficiency

the reduction in time to development and market, and process execution directly translates into financial savings for Shell

Enhanced User Experience

Intuitive interfaces and simplified interactions boosted user engagement and satisfaction.

Secure access

With advanced authentication mechanisms and a user-friendly interface, we ensured secure and seamless access to the ecosystem for all users (both B2B and B2C).

conclusion

DEUS.ai's partnership with Shell in deploying and scaling a Microservices-based ecosystem (as well as the processes and infrastructure we establish around them) allow for autonomous design, development and deployment. This led to reduced potential risks and enabling agility without system-wide implications.

MICROSERVICES: accelerating innovation efforts via a robust and scalable platform.