Unified Message Exchange Platform for communication in MKB

Project description

The UMEP project was started based on market research on the restaurant market, in post-COVID conditions. During the COVID-19 pandemic most of the technology stack was quickly developed and adapted by businesses, that had to the need to facilitate delivery and online ordering due to the restrictions.
Because of this, the technology stack used by restaurants has become fragmented. The problem with these solutions is that they take large margins of revenue made. This leaves businesses vendor-locked while also paying a heavy price.

Our solution enables businesses to choose between any vendors using a Unified Message Exchange Platform (UMEP).

Context

The UMEP project is part of the larger Drive-MKB project. The Drive-MKB project is a project that was created to help businesses trough the COVID-19 pandemic by helping them with their digitization and adopting data-driven technologies.

After analyzing this problem and finding out what businesses struggle with post-COVID. We found that the biggest problem for the businesses was their technology stack, and the large fees spend on it.

Results

The UMEP project has since its start been working on a Unified Message Exchange Platform. This platform is based in research regarding the current IT stack of restaurant businesses and its costs. After that, an investigation has been done on a Message Broker, which provides a centralized point. This centralized point can then be integrated into all the components of the restaurants IT stack (e.g., Delivery services, Marketplaces, Websites, Inventory management and Kitchen tablets).

For this platform, an infrastructure has been designed that enables the solution to be secure, reliable, and scalable. This infrastructure has then been used to realized a prototype.

About the project group

The project group was a shared-learning team, that consisted of experts as well as current students of the infrastructure-stream.