From late-night invoicingto an auction platformthey own themselves

Restlos ran its online auctions on a rented platform. What goes under the hammer there is everything an industrial operation leaves behind, from a single set of machines to the complete fit-out of large facilities. Business was good, the platform could not keep up: as the number of auctions and bids grew, it increasingly ran into the limits of its architecture, above all with the volume of simultaneous requests. On top of that, the platform belonged to someone else. Neither the features nor the data were in the company’s own hands, and every particularity of its business had to be worked around the foreign system.

The company wanted to keep growing. The technology would not let it.

There was a lot of handwork around that platform. After every auction the invoices were written by hand, four to six hours per auction, often late into the night. A separate collection note came with the invoice, and in the warehouse the handover ran on paper. That was solved pragmatically and it worked. It just could not grow along. These were the places where people held a well-rehearsed process together by hand. Such places exist in almost every company that has grown over time, and the work on them looks the same in every industry.

The most delicate moment of the collaboration was the move to the new platform. 60,000 bidder accounts moved to the new platform together with their complete bidding history. Bidders found their accounts and their history again and could carry on bidding as before, without re-registering. There was no measurable loss of bidders. Since then the number of buyer profiles has tripled, to 200,000 verified buyer profiles today.

The last auction on the old platform ran shortly before the new one started: an orderly, hard switch instead of a long and risky period of parallel operation. That was possible because the migration had been prepared long in advance. Even the very first stage back in 2021 took data across from the old system in a structured way, so nothing new had to be invented at the switch.

A company’s well-rehearsed process is its advantage, not its problem. Standard software would have made Restlos work like everyone else. We did it the other way round: we went through the processes together with the people who carry them out every day, from the invoicing evening to the handover at the loading ramp, and built exactly those processes into software. The rules that used to live in heads, folders and lists are in the system today: who may do what, in which order, after which payment. That makes them dependable, even when the person who always knew is on holiday.

qupaya takes responsibility for the software as a result: architecture, development, quality assurance and ongoing development, from the first requirement to the release. Behind it stands a small, stable team, the same developers over the years, who by now know the business as well as the code. The cloud infrastructure came from our partner network, parts of the design from a designer the client brought in. Everyone involved worked together throughout. Operating the platform sits with the client, in close coordination with us. Code, infrastructure and data belong to the client. And what we publish about clients is decided by the clients.

New requirements come out of the client’s day-to-day business and are prioritised and delivered continuously, without interruption since 2021. That is exactly why this page does not tell a finished project story but an ongoing one.

In our own development we use AI tools as well, deliberately and under review: every AI-generated work product goes through review by experienced developers.

How we approach projects like this one is described under From Planning to Delivery. How we pass this way of working with AI on to development teams is described in the Guided Program.

We built the complete operation of a company into software. Your business is a different one. Not a harder one.