More than 600 companies in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg sell Continental tires via garages and webshops. This number is still growing daily. These companies and affiliated webshops need up-to-date information on purchase prices and current stock in order to place orders.
Assignment in bullet points
- Display current information on sales prices and stock at points of sale
- Connect new customers through Sales department and no longer manually by the IT department
- Retain existing IT systems
“Continental’s orders, inventory management and connecting new customers in the Benelux area greatly simplified through API architecture.”
Result in bullet points
- A corporate dealer portal with a mobiele app
- Sales department can connect a new customer within 2 minutes
- Savings on IT costs
- Future new applications and systems are easy to connect
- Drastically reduced telephone and e-mail traffic on purchase prices and stocks
- No ‘freeze’ of the business was needed in the realization of this project
The assignment
Connecting new points of sale to Continental’s system was manually coded by the IT department. The wish was to have new customers easily connected by the Sales department, without the intervention of the IT department. The system (dealer portal) had to be able to process documents, e-mails and orders automatically. Continental’s customers work with different applications, which meant that several links had to be created that could also be activated by the Sales department.
Preconditions: as little load as possible on the systems (processor capacity), but still be able to service as many customers as possible at the same time. No business logic in the link itself, but configurable by the business.
The result
We build a dealer portal. Connecting a new customer only takes 2 minutes and can be done by the Sales department. The project has resulted in substantial savings on IT costs because not every new connection and required links are hardcore programmed anymore. New customers with new applications can be connected directly by Sales with the same ease. Telephone and e-mail traffic on purchase prices and stocks has been drastically reduced. In addition, existing customers have felt nothing of this transition.
Technical challenge
It came down to smart programming: doing as much as possible with as little processing power as possible. HybrIT took care of the network architecture, arranged all cloud services and guided Continental through the implementation. Getting support from the business in this new development was also potentially challenging because of the impact on existing procedures and work. We were able to help the business to substantiate why this development was good for the entire organization.
“The complexity of the system landscape required me to come up with new ways of accessing data, and connecting it to older systems and their limits. An interesting challenge for an architect with the necessary development experience.”
“When I was involved in the assignment, Thomas had the design ready. During the course of the project, new things were added or changed, but the foundation was good and I liked that we could always rely on it. I was pleased to see that as the project progressed, both the business and the IT department became increasingly enthusiastic and began to see the benefits of this solution.”