JPMA lacked the expert resources and experience needed to expand and scale its market-proven application. At a critical time in the company's existence, they began their partnership with Briebug. The partnership brought JPMA the critical strategic planning and best practice application development implementation needed to support their expansion goals.
JPMA STATISTICS
USERS PER MONTH
REQUESTS PER DAY
DAILY USERS
JPMA - Helping Women and Children in Need
JPMA provides a mobile and web application called WICShopper that helps women and their children in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (commonly known as WIC). WIC provides supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk. Using WICShopper, WIC participants can easily download their real-time benefit balances and scan products to verify that they are eligible to buy select items while shopping. The app also helps participants get the most out of their benefits by providing over 500 recipes, ‘Life Hacks’, and nutritional resources provided by WIC state agencies.
The Need for a Partner
The company had bootstrapped for many years to gain traction and was developing the product without experienced engineers, project managers, and UX designers. The company started gaining traction and adoption by several WIC agencies in multiple states. At the same time, a long-term in-house developer who had been working on the product left the company and they were realizing they had to overcome several technical challenges the exponentially growing user base it was creating. These challenges included maintaining two separate native applications (Android and iOS), to rapidly expand features, and the capacity to support the growing caseload (80,000+ daily users and 5+ million requests per day).
Key Decisions and Solutions Implemented
Left with a market-proven product yet lacking the necessary specialized resources needed to maintain and develop it, JPMA partnered with Briebug to augment their product owners and completely trusted Briebug with their development.
“Briebug has specialized experts that provide JPMA the ability to take advantage of bringing in critical expertise at the right time and spend less money on development. I don’t think I realized the full value of what the partnership would bring at the time. Briebug helped us in so many ways that, in hindsight, we never would have been able to achieve if we kept a traditional path of trying to build this on our own by hiring FTEs.”
In typical Briebug fashion, a multi-phase strategy was designed to keep the current product supporting customers while moving rapidly to execute several architectural decisions that supported JPMA’s growth. These decisions included:
Moving from two separate iOS and Android applications to a single Ionic app. This resulted in one place to build and maintain all code for web, iOS, and Android apps. Using updated versions of Ionic and Cordova and newer versions of Android and iOS allowed the product to have built-in error management, tracking, and a direct path for user support.
Initially migrating APIs to Node. This enabled the product to normalize the development stack and migrate away from the previous C#, ASP, .NET API.
Migrating from monolithic VPS to Azure Cloud. This resulted in increased product stability and reduced failures.
Creating a new admin site using technology normalization and management. This decision enabled the Briebug developers to easily build admin tools on top of Node instead of the previous API.
Migrating to NestJS. NestJS enabled the Briebug development team to easily take advantage of upgraded libraries, the current version of Node, access to the entire rich library of plugins and extensions available in the Nest ecosystem.
Moving from monolithic server to microservices with NestJS. This change distributed the server load and allowed the development of improvements and fixes to smaller pieces, without risk to the larger product. Microservices also allow the platform to scale even further, providing easier code organization, encapsulation, and improved cohesion.
All of these updates provided JPMA a future-proof and modern application that was easier to implement into many more state WIC agencies.
“Briebug could see our vision and what we wanted to do functionally, which makes us feel comfortable focusing less on the technical side and focus more of our time and energy on our customers, what their needs were, and how to better meet those needs. The relationship really changed how JPMA does business and I think it was one of the key factors that continue to make us successful.”
Continuously Delivering Rapid Innovation
The updated WICShopper App is currently serving over 700,000 families, ~1 million users per month, and supports over 36 state agencies on a daily basis. The application’s scalable back-end built following NestJS best practices, microservices, and utilizing message queuing, has given JPMA the reliability and robust solution that is easily adaptable to meet customer needs. Users more fully benefit from the WIC program using the app’s intuitive and well-designed user interface.
“I feel like we can do everything that is needed in WIC right now. And it's because we have a very modern product and a development partner who really understands the value of it to our customers and how they are using it. I feel like what we have now is a clean slate that we can really respond to quickly and do anything that is needed in WIC”.
JPMA is now able to rapidly develop new capabilities and valuable features for its customers without the management and liabilities of an in-house development team.
“To hire our own developers limits us to the skills that those specific developers have. And it doesn't make sense for our business. What makes sense for us is to work with an elite development firm like Briebug that we can explain our needs to and know that Briebug has a resource that's able to meet those needs. So even if it fits beyond the certain project that we're working on, if we have some other idea that we want to pursue, even if it's on a completely different technical framework I know that we could explain this to Briebug, and they are going to know how to accomplish it.”
JPMA lacked the expert resources and experience needed to expand and scale its market-proven application. At a critical time in the company's existence, they began their partnership with Briebug. The partnership brought JPMA the critical strategic planning and best practice application development implementation needed to support their expansion goals.
JPMA STATISTICS
USERS PER MONTH
REQUESTS PER DAY
DAILY USERS
JPMA - Helping Women and Children in Need
JPMA provides a mobile and web application called WICShopper that helps women and their children in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (commonly known as WIC). WIC provides supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk. Using WICShopper, WIC participants can easily download their real-time benefit balances and scan products to verify that they are eligible to buy select items while shopping. The app also helps participants get the most out of their benefits by providing over 500 recipes, ‘Life Hacks’ and nutritional resources provided by WIC state agencies.
The Need for a Partner
The company had bootstrapped for many years to gain traction and was developing the product without experienced engineers, project managers, and UX designers. The company started gaining traction and adoption by several WIC agencies in multiple states. At the same time, a long-term in-house developer who had been working on the product left the company and they were realizing they had to overcome several technical challenges the exponentially growing user base it was creating. These challenges included maintaining two separate native applications (Android and iOS), to rapidly expand features, and the capacity to support the growing caseload (80,000+ daily users and 5+ million requests per day).
Key Decisions and Solutions Implemented
Left with a market-proven product yet lacking the necessary specialized resources needed to maintain and develop it, JPMA partnered with Briebug to augment their product owners and completely trusted Briebug with their development.
“Briebug has specialized experts that provide JPMA the ability to take advantage of bringing in critical expertise at the right time and spend less money on development. I don’t think I realized the full value of what the partnership would bring at the time. Briebug helped us in so many ways that, in hindsight, we never would have been able to achieve if we kept a traditional path of trying to build this on our own by hiring FTEs.”
In typical Briebug fashion, a multi-phase strategy was designed to keep the current product supporting customers while moving rapidly to execute several architectural decisions that supported JPMA’s growth. These decisions included:
Moving from two separate iOS and Android applications to a single Ionic app. This resulted in one place to build and maintain all code for web, iOS, and Android apps. Using updated versions of Ionic and Cordova and newer versions of Android and iOS allowed the product to have built-in error management, tracking, and a direct path for user support.
Initially migrating APIs to Node. This enabled the product to normalize the development stack and migrate away from the previous C#, ASP, .NET API.
Migrating from monolithic VPS to Azure Cloud. This resulted in increased product stability and reduced failures.
Creating a new admin site using technology normalization and management. This decision enabled the Briebug developers to easily build admin tools on top of Node instead of the previous API.
Migrating to NestJS. NestJS enabled the Briebug development team to easily take advantage of upgraded libraries, the current version of Node, access to the entire rich library of plugins and extensions available in the Nest ecosystem.
Moving from monolithic server to microservices with NestJS. This change distributed the server load and allowed the development of improvements and fixes to smaller pieces, without risk to the larger product. Microservices also allow the platform to scale even further, providing easier code organization, encapsulation, and improved cohesion.
All of these updates provided JPMA a future-proof and modern application that was easier to implement into many more state WIC agencies.
“Briebug could see our vision and what we wanted to do functionally, which makes us feel comfortable focusing less on the technical side and focus more of our time and energy on our customers, what their needs were, and how to better meet those needs. The relationship really changed how JPMA does business and I think it was one of the key factors that continue to make us successful.”
Continuously Delivering Rapid Innovation
The updated WICShopper App is currently serving over 700,000 families, ~1 million users per month, and supports over 36 state agencies on a daily basis. The application’s scalable back-end built following NestJS best practices, microservices, and utilizing message queuing, has given JPMA the reliability and robust solution that is easily adaptable to meet customer needs. Users more fully benefit from the WIC program using the app’s intuitive and well-designed user interface.
“I feel like we can do everything that is needed in WIC right now. And it's because we have a very modern product and a development partner who really understands the value of it to our customers and how they are using it. I feel like what we have now is a clean slate that we can really respond to quickly and do anything that is needed in WIC”.
JPMA is now able to rapidly develop new capabilities and valuable features for its customers without the management and liabilities of an in-house development team.
“To hire our own developers limits us to the skills that those specific developers have. And it doesn't make sense for our business. What makes sense for us is to work with an elite development firm like Briebug that we can explain our needs to and know that Briebug has a resource that's able to meet those needs. So even if it fits beyond the certain project that we're working on, if we have some other idea that we want to pursue, even if it's on a completely different technical framework I know that we could explain this to Briebug, and they are going to know how to accomplish it.”
