Travel management software: all in one app

Rosetti Marino has 1,200 employees across sites around the world, and until this project requesting reimbursement for a business trip meant going through five desktop programs: one to book flights, one for ferry tickets, one for credit cards, one for accommodation. Approval or rejection had to be requested inside each of the five. This business travel management software puts them all behind a single app.

What was underneath, beyond the five

The work was not rewriting those five programs, but making them talk to a single thing. Underneath there were:

• access, which went through several LDAP directories on different Active Directory instances, inside a Windows Server, IIS and Microsoft Server stack;
• a content manager for the attachments to reimbursement requests;
• a messaging system, used to ask for missing details on a request.

An API layer in front, and the five stay

We wrote an app that calls an API-based system: it handles the traffic and abstracts the target software. Whoever uses it does not know which of the five is answering.

The five programs stay where they are, connected to their suppliers and their contracts.

What an employee sees

• login with biometric check;
• push notifications when a new request or a message arrives;
• features and data that change with the company role: whoever requests a trip and whoever approves it do not see the same app.

How a reimbursement is requested now

From a single app, on the phone. The request goes out, the approval or rejection arrives there, and attachments and messages sit in the same place as the request.

Support continues to this day.