Green Space Pro: Franchise Management Platform for a Highly-Regulated Industry

Franchise management is a highly bureaucratic process with enormous intricacies, unobvious details, and barely predictable nuances. Whether in a commercial franchise or a government-regulated sector like cannabis, conducting the given business right means complying with necessary regulations, keeping up to date with industry or business requirements, and generally suggests a great deal of operational precision on any level. As a system, Green Space Pro is meant to help businesses manage their franchises with ease and complete process understanding.

The platform features three key user roles: the Vendor, the Regulator, and the Green Space Pro administration. 

• Tech Lead
• Back-end Developers (Node.js)
• Front-end Developers (Svelte.js)
• DevOps Engineer
• UI/UX Designer
• QA Engineer
• Project / Account Manager

• Vendor Workspace. Each Vendor has a dedicated workplace where they can see and manage their Locations (one or multiple). Within the Location, the shop owner can create and resolve tasks, tag the responsible employees, add, refresh and delete data, send requests, and generally conduct operations regarding the shop management.
• Regulatory Workflows. To make an example, let’s say there’s a regulation for cannabis shops to close by a certain hour (say, 9 pm), possess certain licenses or there are updates to any rules or regulations, the platform provides forms to submit those documents, notifies the Vendor about regulatory changes, and, in turn, provides the Regulators with an appropriate UI to check in the audits.
• Scope Expansion. Initially, the Green Space Pro team’s request for Devox was the UI/UX redesign. When our designer presented a dashboard and the home page, the GSP team extended their request to a dedicated development team as it lacked internal engineering capacity.
• Strict Deadline. The client’s goal was to release a PWA application by November 2023: it was a month when an important conference the startup participated in was taking place.
• Leadership Gap. Three months before the release milestone, the CTO resigned, leaving infrastructure questions unanswered and demanding rapid replacement and acceleration.
• Milestone Achieved. Nevertheless, with some acceleration to our pace, we’ve successfully completed this milestone in time for the conference.

• Tech Lead Rapid Replacement. The first urgent measure we took was providing a tech lead from our side who thoroughly reviewed the infrastructure and overall tech side and architecture nuances. As a result, we’ve added a DevOps specialist who fixed immediate bugs that existed at the moment of the previous specialist’s resignation. Tech-wise, we divided the earlier united front-end and back-end, which was utterly unsecured. For this, we’ve also hired Node.js back-end specialists who set up a comprehensive back-end infrastructure, securing the database from action on the client side. We’ve picked Svelte.js as a front-end framework. Being a rare species, Svelte is agile, lightweight, and performative. It also works nicely with reactivity, which was essential provided the tight deadline. 
• QA. The GSP team initially worked with low-quality outsourced QA engineers. In collaboration with Devox, these positions were eventually replaced with a single QA from our team.
• UI/UX and Features: Statistics, Filing System, Notifications. Apart from elaborating the platform’s UI/UX and working on its server-side, we abundantly saturated it with different features.
• PWA. Initially, the platform didn’t have any mobile support whatsoever. The Devox team developed a Progressive Web Application (PWA), which basically means the possibility to open a web page in a default browser via an icon. We’ve also adapted the entire view for mobile (as the Green Space Pro team this format before), implementing the most crucial functionality (like creating or resolving tasks) in a user-friendly manner.