“I was looking for a reliable custom software development company that would work with us in a close relationship as a partner, not just a project-based vendor. Our online product and the business involves complicated workflows and requires a great deal of technical dedication. This is where Arkbauer came in. Since we started to work with Arkbauer, they became our main IT vendor, because of the relationship, reliability and technical excellence we now can enjoy. I already have and will recommend Arkbauer to other companies in a need of a rare and affordable software development talent.” Hotel management is a complex task – especially if you find yourself using Excel or an old piece of software to run it. Our client had a clear vision of how this issue could be resolved by creating software that was easy to use, flexible and accessible from anywhere and anytime.
HaDre Hotelsoftware is a modern web-based SaaS (Software as a Service) application offering full-service hotel management for hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs and serviced apartments in Germany. It is integrated with the major industry players, such as Expedia.com, Booking.com via Viato “Channel Manager” service. It is also compatible with Datev and GoBD.
Initial development was started back in 2016 by an Indian IT company and the client worked very closely with the developers, explaining each and every feature and function along the way. It was known that the software was not of the highest quality, but it did the job.
We were approached by the client to develop one of the most crucial and complex system modules – the Invoicing module. Germany has very strict rules regarding sensitive data handling and therefore there was a concern from the client that the current vendors wouldn’t be able to develop the required functionality.
We started off by performing an overall system audit to understand the current situation – both from a technical perspective as well as the user experience. There was no documentation to refer to, but we did get some insights from the developers to get started. We learned that there was no version control used, there were no tests, and the source code quality was quite low – there were some PHP classes containing more than 10k lines of code and only a few methods.
We started with a team of three of our developers working together with the Indian developers to gain all the required knowledge until eventually, they finished their part in the project and we took it over completely. There was also a strict deadline for the initial launch – it was a case of “now or never”, due to market and industry competition, so, we increased our team to five developers to get it done on time.
It was decided that the client would be the first actual customer using this software in live mode and they used it to manage two of their own existing hotels.
We launched the solution in time!
We now continue to maintain the software and develop new features based on the end-user input and feedback.
PHP7, Yii, MariaDB, Gearman, GraphQL, Javascript, SCSS
