Pronto

Inspiration

Since pandemic started, people started to look for solutions to fulfill their needs from food, groceries and medicines. This created a demand surge on home delivery services as the first choice to avoid going out during the lock-down. However, with the overloaded delivery slots and products stocks running out on the online grocery service providers side, people started to see their orders delayed, and even new customers couldn't find new slots due to the limited number of service providers with not too many options for Click & Collect services available. People started to go to offline groceries and stand in queues for long time just to get the chance to buy their basic needs in a panic buying behavior, while some others went to the stores as they prefer to pick their grocery by themselves. This put them as well as grocers’ employees in a high risk of contagion. Grocers employees as well have another risk on contagion having to work long hours to refill shelves after the panic buying. This increased grocers’ operational costs and hit their bottom line eventually. In parallel, restaurants had to close their door hitting their financials leaving many people unemployed while grocers’ employees are at their peak in an unbalanced workforce situation. COVID-19 pandemic proved food industry needs new tools and technology to disrupt the ways grocers, restaurants and consumers interact in order to be able cope with such crisis to save people lives, ensure business continuity, and improve peoples' lives even in the post-pandemic future.

Hence, we decided to focus our project on the four customers involved in this situation:

Online Customers: those who prefer to shop online but had to go to the stores instead due to limited delivery and pick up options
Offline Customers: those who prefer to shop in the stores by themselves
Grocers and restaurants: those who seek business continuity while reducing risk of contagion on their employees and ensure their safety
Unemployed people: those who lost their jobs due to their business temporary closure

What it does

Pronto is a digital marketplace platform for grocers, restaurants and pharmacies in the form of a mobile application that serve stores and their customers with the following services:

Contactless Shopping: Customer can avoid queues and practice social distancing by booking a slot to shop in their favorite grocer directly through the app in-advance. Customer can check the available slot and choose the most suitable one for them. Once reservation is done, customer will receive a QR code in the app, that will be used to go into the store in the reserved slot through a smart QR gate at the grocer's entrance. Once the customer get in, the app will activate the Contactless Self-Checkout option letting the customer scan the barcode of all the needed products with the built-in barcode scanner in the app, then checkout and pay the bill directly from the app and get a QR code without any physical interaction with the store employees. Finally, customer will use the latter QR code to go out from the grocer through the smart QR gate, skipping lines and cashiers.
Contactless Dining: Customer can avoid crowded restaurants and practice social distancing by booking a slot to dine in their favorite restaurant directly through the app in-advance based on the number of customers allowed in the restaurant at the same time set by the restaurant management. Customer can check the available slot and choose the most suitable one for them. Once reservation is done, customer will receive a QR code in the app, that will be used to go into the restaurant in the reserved slot through a smart QR gate at the restaurant's entrance. Once the customer get in the restaurant, he or she will scan a QR code on the table to explore the restaurant menu with dishes and pairing recommendations, then order through the app directly with no need to interact with the staff. When the order is ready, the app will notify the customer to pick the order from a dedicated pick up area inside the store. once done with the dinning, customer can just pay the bill via the app, then receive a QR code to use to leave the restaurant premises through the QR smart gate.
Home Delivery: Customer can order online their needs from their favorite stores and get it delivered in as little as 30 minutes to their doorsteps in a convenient, seamless, and contactless way.
Click & Collect: Customer can order online their needs from their favorite stores and curbside pickup their orders whenever suits them contactless directly into their car boots.

All the four solutions aim to minimize physical contact between people to reduce the risk of contagion and ensure their safety, offer convenience to customers and ensure business continuity for grocers and restaurants during and post the pandemic, improving their workforce utilization and efficiency by reallocating cashiers to other picking tasks for online business to improve their bottom line. In addition, open many new job opportunities for unemployed people who lost their jobs because of the crisis.

How we built it

We built 3 apps to control the full business model: Customer app, Store App, and Driver App.

Application Technology Stack

Android: Android Studio 3.x + Java 8 2.
iOS: Xcode 9.4 + Swift 4 3.
Frontend: Angular 6 4.
Backend: Node JS 5.8 + MongoDB 3.0 + MySQL 5.7
Hosting Server: AWS
3rd Party Integrations: Stripe, Paypal, Xero, Twilio

Challenges we ran into

Introducing Pick Up and Home Delivery capabilities need high level of collaboration with grocers to better utilize the workforce
Introducing Pick Up and Home Delivery capabilities require in some cases store layout change to accommodate for pick up areas needed
Resistance from some stores to move to home delivery and pick up model
Driving awareness with the contactless dining and contactless shopping features with customers

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have been able to develop our MVP in less than 3 months. We started this project with the scope of home delivery and pick up services only before the pandemic, but we manage to pivot quickly to add extra feature for contactless shopping and dining in less than one month.

What we learned

We learned how to move fast, fail fast, learn from it and embrace change to build solution that can solve real world problems now not later.
During building our prototype, we gained a huge knowledge about the market, the current market players, and how to create competitive advantages.
We gained a big amount of technical knowledge in a noticeably short time that helped us to be able to launch a successful product that we are proud of in a very short time.