Open Loyalty
Open Loyalty implementation enabled handling 300,000 daily transactions
Drop Tank is a leading loyalty service provider for major fuel brands and convenience stores based in the U.S. They wanted to update their system engine. The company needed a strong, robust base to make sure they could create modern solutions that would keep up with the evolving market.
Open Loyalty caught their eye because it has all the needed features and could be customized to meet their requirements. For an experienced company like that, quality, scalability, and performance are crucial.
Service
Discovery phase
Open Loyalty customization
Scope
Updating a loyalty solution
Vertical
Open Loyalty as a part
of a SaaS solution
Drop Tank is a loyalty technology dedicated to gas stations. The company offers their services to leading fuel companies and convenience stores. Their goal is to provide simple, consistent loyalty systems to businesses that need them.
Drop Tank’s mission is to learn and improve constantly, so they regularly develop and test new solutions. It’s a brand that values ethics and responsibility. Their products include multiple solutions that use apps, promotional materials, and other measures to help big petrol market players and other brands draw the attention of their customers and grow sales. For example, their apps were implemented by Fortune 500 companies to allow their customers to collect points easily and exchange them for numerous benefits.
As their business started to grow rapidly, they decided that it was time to replace their existing loyalty points system and were looking for something innovative that could be adjusted to fit their needs. The old technology they were using started to decrease their position within the niche, which was a signal they should introduce changes. The requirements? Scalability, a high level of customization, and an API-first platform that’s easy to use. Open Loyalty seemed like the perfect choice.
After two attempts at integrating loyalty software with two different companies, both of which turned out to fall short of their expectations, the Drop Tank team had a decision to make. Here’s how Timothy Miller, the company CTO, describes it:
The project began with a discovery phase. Drop Tank was well prepared. They came to Divante with a list of defined requirements, so we knew exactly what had to be done. To be sure we were moving in the right direction, our team performed some deep gap analyses. This was done to find out which parts of the Open Loyalty software would need adjustments and if there were any functionalities we had to add. By doing deep gap analyses, we were able to ensure that the client and their customers would be satisfied with the result. When we collected all the requirements, we walked through them and produced technical documentation to specify the whys, whats, and whens.
Some of the functionalities we’ve built include:
- Extended customer profiles
- Customer statuses
- Support for different time zones so promotions match the customer’s time zone
- Earning rules categories
- Custom metadata to all earning rules
- Limitations for earning points in a certain period of time
- Exclusion of certain products when calculating points
- Extended import capabilities
- Custom fraud detection
Everything was tested to fulfill the client’s scalability and
performance requirements.
It turned out that Drop Tank has a strong partnership with Oracle, so we had to keep that in mind. That particular fact had a substantial impact on their choice of the database engine. Due to their decision, the product we developed doesn’t have the default Open Loyalty database, called Postgres, but runs on Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing (ATP). It’s available as a self-managed service on Oracle Cloud and offers self-optimization, scalability, and a solid AI-powered monitoring engine.
During that process, we also found out that the default Open Loyalty database storage and object mapping library, Doctrine, has minimal support for Oracle ATP. To utilize its powerful capabilities and not lose performance, we had to override a big part of this library. These adjustments were crucial to meeting the client’s business needs, so we worked hard to develop all of them. The results were excellent!
Timothy Miller
Drop Tank’s CTO
“The fact that Open Loyalty listened to our needs from the get-go and decided to make huge changes to their software to meet our needs was huge for us. It truly spoke volumes about who Open Loyalty is as a company and how it does things.”
Timothy Miller
Drop Tank’s CTO
“The fact that Open Loyalty listened to our needs from the get-go and decided to make huge changes to their software to meet our needs was huge for us. It truly spoke volumes about who Open Loyalty is as a company and how it does things.”
