The situation
The Concept Exhibition (TCE) runs the TCE Baby Expo, one of Malaysia’s largest baby and parenting fairs, now past its 60th edition. The expo is held at Mid Valley Exhibition Centre and MITEC in Kuala Lumpur, and at Mid Valley Southkey in Johor Bahru.
Its platform was already large and live. Parents register for the expo, collect points and win cashback. Sellers run their stores on it. Crew at the expo counters use it to verify visitors and hand out rewards. Management runs the business from its own back office.
When TCE brought in a new CTO, we worked alongside them. The platform carried problems from before, and the business couldn’t stop for months to rebuild it. There was always another expo coming.
The hard part
On an expo platform, a software problem is an operations problem. If voucher redemption fails on expo day, the crew still have a queue of parents at the counter.
So the expo calendar set the priorities. Production problems came first, then what the next event needed, then new features and longer-term improvements. All of it had to fit around the same deadlines.
What we did
We fixed the inherited problems aggressively until the event team had tools they could run an expo on. Around that we took on the technical ownership: releases, QA, debugging, patches, infrastructure, and support during the expos themselves, not only up to deployment.
More than 72 releases went out across the customer app, the seller portal, the web store, the back office, payments and the APIs that connect them. The platform serves four groups:
- Parents register for expos, collect points, win cashback, join the community and shop online.
- Sellers manage their catalogue, vouchers, orders, inventory and sales.
- Expo crew verify visitor profiles, add points for what visitors spend, and handle gifts, cashback and vouchers.
- Management runs the operation from its own back office.
We also added e-commerce, so the platform sells online as well as supporting the expos.
What changed
The expos kept running while the platform was stabilised. The parent, seller, crew and management systems kept growing, with e-commerce and new crew tools added along the way.
