FlexR is a company that was formed by 2 kiwi entrepreneurs having a problem with their original business. Their fuel card business was growing too fast. Their legacy system of manually inputted data, semi-automated invoicing, and managing customer accounts couldn’t keep up with the demand.
A solution was needed that would enable bulk processing of tasks and automating of functions and would be flexible enough to keep growing with them. Enter FlexR, which is described as the Xero of fuel card billing.
The original platform wasn’t designed for the kind of growth they were experiencing. For many years, they experienced in excess of 40% growth per annum. Their business was built on a windows application running on servers in their office. As the business expanded, they knew there was a big risk of running their business this way and made the decision to digitally transform their business.
They hired their own developers and started again, taking the elements they liked from their legacy system and then rebuilt it. As they grew further, they knew they had to get their technology infrastructure out of the building and into the Cloud.
They needed to create a more intuitive and automated system to manage fuel card applications, customer information, comprehensive card management, transactions, and invoicing – specifically tailored for the fuel industry.
They needed an agile technology platform that would grow with them, and they needed an equally agile IT partner who could keep pace with the rapid growth they were experiencing.
We first worked with them to migrate their applications and users off the on-premise hardware onto Azure hosted VMs. This was an interim step prior to moving to a Platform as a service (PaaS) solution. On the PaaS side, we set up a CI/CD pipeline to help streamline the process of deploying new applications by automating the process of updating and deploying applications and testing the code before deployment.
The applications also migrated from using Application Gateways over to Azure Front Door to improve external access. Moving from Application Gateways to Azure Front Door means they can use the service across different regions, it simplifies SSL certificate management and provides greater control over the firewall at a lower price.
FlexR’s long term goal was to get away from VM’s and really embrace microservices. It was a long held ambition and with the Azure expertise provided by Securecom, we could make it happen.
Being part of their journey of digital transformation has been hugely rewarding for our team.