GS1 India Traceability Platform: 70 TPS, 3x Performance
70 TPS
100k rows
30%
30%
About
GS1 India is a government-backed non-profit organization responsible for standardizing unique product codes and building traceability solutions across retail, healthcare, textile, pesticides, Active Pharma Ingredients, defence, and manufacturing industries in India.
Their existing DataKart and DataTrace platforms — the backbone of India's national product registry and traceability infrastructure — were built on legacy technology and needed a full modernization to meet growing industry demand and scale.
Hakuna Matata Solutions won a competitive tender to modernize both platforms, taking on one of the most technically complex engagements in our portfolio — a system serving multiple regulated industries simultaneously, with no room for downtime and limited legacy documentation to work from.
Business Challenges
Modernizing a government-backed traceability platform — one running live for retail, pharma, and manufacturing industries simultaneously — with no documentation and scattered institutional knowledge.
- Unavailability of documentation on existing system: Despite multiple rounds of discussion with stakeholders, knowledge was scattered across key members — a common challenge in long-running government systems with high staff turnover.
- Data-driven System: Many functionalities were hidden inside customer-specific data — hard-coded edge cases, custom columns, and additional tables built for individual clients made the generalization requirements significantly more complex.
- Resource Unavailability: On a longer project with many stakeholders, team continuity is a constant risk. Mid-project resource changes required regrouping without impacting delivery timelines.
- Data Migration: Despite thorough load testing in UAT, moving to production with live data surfaced siloed data and customer-specific implementations that were only discoverable post go-live — requiring rapid response to maintain platform stability.
Solution
Hakuna Matata rebuilt GS1 India's legacy DataKart and DataTrace platforms on a cloud-agnostic microservices architecture — achieving 70 transactions per second at 30% lower infrastructure cost than before.
- Scalable, cloud-agnostic microservices architecture driven entirely by open-source — KeyCloak, Postgres, ClickHouse, Kong, Kubernetes — designed to handle 70 transactions per second at lower infrastructure cost.
- Super-efficient Excel reading algorithm and duplicate detection capable of processing 100K rows in seconds — eliminating the manual bottleneck in GTIN request workflows.
- Built a GTIN Allocation system that delivers allocations in a fraction of a second — without pre-built allocation tables or dummy database rows.
- Built an integrated platform for manufacturers, suppliers, buyers, retailers, and e-tailers to manage GTIN allocation, label generation, and traceability services in one place.
- A dynamic, configurable system designed to meet growing customization needs across diverse industry verticals — especially in traceability.
- Data Migration Tool with ETL support to migrate data between SQL databases with minimal disruption.
Our Approach
Our Steps
Outcome
GS1 India's traceability platform now handles 70 TPS with 3x previous throughput — processing 100K rows in seconds and serving manufacturers, retailers, and pharma companies across India.
- Multi-level label generation supporting Data Matrix, Barcode, QR Code, and GS1-128 standards.
- API monitoring and rate-limiting per customer — giving GS1 India full control over platform usage.
- Sellers can define their own label templates for traceability, reducing admin dependency.
- Full compliance with GS1 standards for unique ID creation and EPCIS standards for interoperability.
- Batch and lot traceability across all supported industry verticals.
- Manufacturers can manage dynamic fields independently — removing the admin bottleneck entirely.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you modernize a legacy government traceability system without disrupting operations?
Using a cloud-agnostic microservices approach — we rebuilt GS1 India's DataKart and DataTrace platforms on Azure while maintaining backward compatibility, achieving 70 transactions per second post-migration.
What is GS1 DataKart and how was it modernized?
GS1 DataKart is India's national barcode and product data registry. We modernized it with open-source microservices, reducing cloud costs by 30% while tripling platform performance.
What technology handles 70+ transactions per second for supply chain traceability?
A cloud-agnostic microservices architecture on Azure, supporting multi-label generation (data matrix, barcode, QR, GS1-128) and horizontal scaling under peak government traceability load.
What is the cost of modernizing a government-backed traceability platform?
Modernization at this scale typically delivers ROI through infrastructure savings — GS1 India achieved 30% cloud cost reduction alongside 3x performance improvement.
Selected Work
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