The Client

Delaware North (DN) is a global scale stadium management company that provides all aspects of service required to run a sports and events stadium.

The Challenge

In July 2022, the Australian Football League entered an agreement with Amazon to install Just Walk Out (JWO) frictionless shopping technology into two of its Food and Beverage outlets in Marvel Stadium in Melbourne, Australia. As the stadium operator, DN was responsible for delivering the proposition.

After two failed attempts with a local and global System Integrator, the Amazon JWO team approached Daemon based on the work we had already completed with them in the UK on a JWO retail integration.

Our Approach

The first task was to win the confidence of the DN team in Melbourne in a series of discovery meetings. In these meetings, we laid out the essentials of the project and worked through a process of information gathering to ensure we had all the correct stakeholders on board and that all parties knew what the proposition entailed. This also included the architectural design elements of the project.

The Daemon team assigned to the project then built out the API ingestion of data from JWO, the connector business logic to test customer viability and price baskets, and the client to input data into the DN systems. The connector app was responsible for data persistence and all retry logic if third-party payment endpoints failed and the EPOS was not available.

Daemon utilized several serverless products from AWS to expedite delivery and reduce the overhead of custom infrastructure. AWS API Gateway manages the interface between the JWO API and the Daemon connector, while AWS ECS runs the container, and AWS RDS provides database capabilities.  

All computer code was built using TDD, with acceptance tests in all environments, and code delivered to production in IaC for expected and persistently reliable outcomes.

A customer receipt portal was delivered alongside a staff accessible refund portal. 

The Outcome

The project was completed on time and after an extensive JWO training and testing period was put into production in May 2023.

The connector exceeded its response target of 3 seconds by responding to a gate open request of less than 20 milliseconds (average) and proved its worth when the POS failed, but all transactions were rerun into the accounting and stock control systems at a later date.

After a successful five months of operation and support, DN has decided to roll out the connector to two more F&B outlets in Marvel, and Daemon is in discussion to install it in a number of other DN-operated stadiums.

Technology stack:

AWS best practice control tower with guardrails account
AWS API Gateway
AWS ECS/Fargate
AWS RDS
AWS Lambda
AWS Cognito
Go
Terraform
REST
React/JavaScript