Building the Hospitality Procurement Platform at Workwise

Kushal joined Workwise in early 2025 as one of the first three engineers. The company had an existing platform serving EPC companies, and the decision was made to expand into hospitality procurement. He was chosen as the lead engineer for the new platform, owning it from requirement gathering through production.

His first task was to establish the permission and approval foundation. Hospitality procurement requires fine-grained access control: a user might be a commercial evaluator for Hotel A, Department B, but must have no visibility into Hotel B's workflows. He designed and built an RBAC and ABAC system that scoped every permission to a specific business unit, department, and attribute combination.

The hardest architectural challenge was connecting permissions to approval workflows at runtime. When an approval instance is created, the system filters eligible participants by their role and the attributes attached to that role for the specific business unit. This made it structurally impossible for a user from one hotel to be included in another hotel's approval chain.

Once the permission layer was stable, Kushal built the full RFQ-to-purchase-order lifecycle. A request for quotation moves through vendor quoting, technical committee evaluation, commercial committee evaluation and negotiation, and multi-level purchase order approval before a PO is sent to the vendor. Each stage has its own approval policy, defined by the hotel, not the platform.

The approval engine itself was designed for extensibility. Policies, levels, and any-or-all rules are configurable per business unit, so Hotel A can require two levels of approval while Hotel B runs a different workflow entirely. The schema was built so that adding a new approval type requires no structural changes.

Kushal also led the platform's migration from MongoDB to PostgreSQL when a client required AWS-hosted infrastructure and ISO certification compliance. This required re-architecting the data layer and ensuring end-to-end encryption across all stored data.

He integrated external ERP systems to support clients who split their operations across platforms, and connected external AI services via REST APIs, keeping them fully decoupled from the core application state.