Strategy Revolutionizing the Food Pick-up Experience Through Enterprise-Scale Digital Transformation Cargill We helped Cargill’s Digital Business Studio transform the software infrastructure of its newly developed startup, Chekt, into an enterprise-ready scalable and secure product. Overview Chekt Please Driven by the vast industry knowledge of Cargill’s food experts, Chekt is a smart modular food locker solution designed to automate controlled handoff for takeout and delivery order pickup. The product combines state-of-the-art locker pods and robust, flexible, enterprise-ready software with vast integration capabilities. It establishes a new front-of-house experience for quick-serve restaurants. Challenge Secure and scale the infrastructure of the Chekt product, which is in the pilot stage of its lifecycle, to resolve reliability issues and get it ready for production at scale. Insight Chekt’s architecture has to be designed with 99% uptime in mind and be able to handle peak workloads to account for the various use cases and user demand. Solution After a cohesive assessment of Chekt’s architecture, we transitioned its monolithic API to microservices to transform it into a secure and scalable enterprise-ready product. As the product continued to evolve and progress, we realized we needed the maturity of a world-class, scale-ready software organization. We researched and identified MentorMate as a great partner to help bring our product from an MVP to an enterprise-ready product. Nate Shrader Founder and Product Leader, Chekt SOLUTION Getting Things in Order Our strategic partnership with Chekt began with an architecture assessment phase. While Chekt’s initial team was well suited for the pilot stage of the project, the company required an additional partner with the experience and the mature processes necessary to help Chekt scale. We established a cross-functional collaboration to bring out the product’s true value going forward. Our teams conducted a comprehensive codebase and infrastructure analysis to discover potential security vulnerabilities, technical risks to the product’s vision, and technology implementation and reliability issues. After identifying gaps in the infrastructure, we collaborated with Chekt’s initial development team to address the most pressing issues and ensure the product’s stability and security. Our phased approach allowed us to begin work on implementing new features and services while the initial Chekt team collaborated with us on fixing bugs. Services Strategic ConsultingAlign Your Vision and Business Strategy Web DevelopmentConsistent Experience Across Platforms Quality AssuranceEnsure the quality of your software Cloud and DevOpsFuture-proof and Scale Your Infrastructure I was really impressed with how quickly MentorMate jumped in and got up to speed. The team did an excellent job of listening and asking the right questions to gain a shared understanding of what we had built. They learned of our plans for the future and our strategic goals as a business and then quickly got on the same page to move forward together as one team. Nate Shrader Founder and Product Leader, Chekt APPROACH Stabilize, Secure, Scale The initial architecture assessment gathered actionable insights and allowed us to build the right team of experts for the product’s specific needs. Blending strategic insights with deep web development, cloud-native expertise, and human-centered design practices, we collaborated with Chekt stakeholders to stabilize the product and address scale readiness issues. Then, we updated the existing software infrastructure from its prior monolithic state to one that is microservice-based and integrated additional security capabilities to eliminate vulnerabilities. A microservice-based approach allowed us to scale the product more effectively, maintain the architecture better, and deploy seamlessly without any friction or downtime. It helped Chekt improve the workflow and flexibly bring beneficial processes to production. Additionally, it enabled the development team to turn features on and off depending on the customer’s configuration needs. This allowed further flexibility as the team could focus on supporting one application but could quickly provide custom experiences based on location needs. A Roadmap to Success We provided a variety of diagrams and schemas of how to change the product’s infrastructure, juxtaposing the new features and direction with the current state of the product. This helped us achieve a cohesive product vision and gave Chekt a better understanding of how our experts envisioned the new infrastructure setup. Additionally, stakeholders on both sides of the project were equipped with insights and technological expertise on what new microservices to implement and at what cadence. After achieving product stability, the microservices approach really showed its value. The changes we made to the infrastructure enabled Chekt to support location-specific features, while the usability and flexibility of the pods themselves made the product stand out among the competition. Implementing a new webhook service allowing for push notifications to partnering apps helped Chekt secure major integration partnerships with some of the biggest food delivery applications in the U.S. IMPACT Checking All the Boxes Eliminating stability issues, streamlining workflows, and rethinking the technical architecture transformed Chekt into a truly scalable enterprise-ready digital product. As a result of our work together, Chekt secured new partner integrations and won several major new clients. Additionally, MentorMate’s continuation engineering team took over the support of the Chekt product, providing a customized Tier 1 call support solution that ensures that the product operates smoothly. To date, we’ve handled every issue presented to us aside from hardware-related issues. It was clear from the first exploration calls through onboarding that MentorMate had the mature practices and success framework we were looking for. The team’s ability to consistently assess, plan, and deliver significant value at each stage of our collaboration was outstanding. Cally Johnsen Director, Customer Success - Innovation, Cargill SERIOUSLY CUSTOM SOFTWARE Distinctly Designed. Brilliantly Built. Everyone working on your project is fully invested in its success. We care just as much about how your software looks and performs as we do about the problem that it’s solving. We work, learn, and celebrate together, measuring success by the duration of our long-term partnerships. Contact us
We helped Cargill’s Digital Business Studio transform the software infrastructure of its newly developed startup, Chekt, into an enterprise-ready scalable and secure product.