overview

Who:

M-KOPA, a pioneering connected asset financing company that offers millions of underbanked customers access to life-enhancing products and services.

Project:

Replace existing platform with new M2M platform and support new and existing products.

the challenge

M-KOPA Solar is the market leader of “pay-as-you-go” energy; with over 600,000 connected homes in East Africa, they combine mobile payments and IoT technology to enable consumer financing of solar products.

M-KOPA was experiencing a surge in customer demand, had reached its capacity and were unable to add new devices to their existing platform without significant delay and disruption.

business drivers

M-KOPA realised they needed a solution that was rapidly scalable, responded quickly to fluctuating demand and available to a large host of users as the need for power surged throughout the day.

Their existing platform was owned and managed by a third party who were unable to service increasing demands.  M-KOPA realised that their growth strategy demanded they wholly own the technology on which their business was based.

the solution

We focused initially on the design, architecture, development, and testing of M2M platforms for M-KOPA’s existing products. As our understanding developed Applicita in partnership with Microsoft developed a state-of-the-art IoT command and control platform.

We worked alongside the M-KOPA Hardware and Firmware teams to scope, develop and test a bespoke custom software Service Fabric solution using the Actor Pattern. We transitioned vital functionality to the new platform and migrated users from the old to the new platform over a period of several months.

By processing data in real-time, M-KOPA are now able to respond intelligently to device status reducing the operational overhead and so driving down the cost-per-device to their customers.

The entire programme of works was delivered with minimal disruption to M-KOPA’s existing technology roadmap.  There are significant decreases in maintenance and service downtime and customer service teams report a reduction of 63% in customer support calls.

Applicita assigned the IP of the solution to M-KOPA in its entirety, so they now wholly own the technology – breaking any dependency on third parties and the solution has introduced a new level of detailed insight into device behaviour allowing M-KOPA to improve their customer experience and inform future product design.

results

1. Developed an enterprise computing system for self-sufficient maintenance.
2. Decreased downtime for maintenance or service issues.
3. Increased capacity to support more customers.
4. Reduced time to market in order to test new products.

tech overview

Technical Solution:
Service Fabric used to host platform logic, DotNet used to implement platform logic, angular used to implement Administration Console, Azure Cloud Services

Technologies:
Service Fabric, DotNet, Angular, Azure Cloud Services, SQL Server

Design Patterns:
Microservices, Command Query Responsibility Seperation (CQRS), Domain Driven Design (DDD), Unit Testing, Integration Testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment.

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