Digitalization of market- and corporate planning for an automotive supplier
Digitalization of market- and corporate planning for an automotive supplier
- Harmonisation of global processes for market- and sales planning involving all stakeholders
- Development of a group-wide platform for holistic, efficient and consistent planning
- Improving the identification and tracking of market potentials & trends among competitors
- Data exchange via business warehouse for deep integration into company processes
- Long-term data enables well-founded investment and planning decisions
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Digital sales-, controlling- and planning processes in the corporate environment
Digital sales-, controlling- and planning processes in the corporate environment
Sales and business planning for turnover and number of units in Excel? Does this sound familiar to you? Our client, a leading international player in the automotive industry, faced the same challenge. Together, we reorganised processes and developed software that not only manages sales and targets, but also standardises corporate planning worldwide and maps it completely digitally.
Today, with 600 users worldwide, the software is the second most important software in the company and the source of truth for management decisions, strategy and planning for the organisation.
Challenges and solutions
Challenges and solutions
- Management of acquisition, taking into account all vehicle development projects worldwide
- Globally established structures and processes for planning in various business units and regions
- Different data sources and lack of comparability of planning data for sales, finance, supply chain and manufacturing
- Resource-intensive reporting that is only possible with the corresponding lead time
- Processing of market and customer information from 600 participating sales and finance employees worldwide
- No ad-hoc analyses of market and customer potential possible without preparing the data and tying up resources
- Standardisation of global planning processes, methods and calculation paths
- Abolition of scattered Excel tools and replacement by globally usable web application
- Digital planning of quantities and turnover in sales/acquisition and ongoing projects
- Gradual integration of other business units and phases of the product chain
- Real-time analyses and real-time reporting directly from the system
- Data exchange with other company systems and business warehouses
- Automatic storage of planning statuses and reports to compare information
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- About the customer
Our client is an international 1st tier supplier in the automotive industry. With over 10,000 employees and 50 production and development facilities worldwide, it is the top supplier in its field and offers solutions for the majority of vehicles produced worldwide.
Containerised architecture for seamless integration into the corporate world
Containerised architecture for seamless integration into the corporate world
Focus-Technologies
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Other Technologies
Technological setup
Technological setup
The application is operated as a combination of several Docker containers in an Azure Kubernetes cluster to ensure flexibility and stability. Three sub-applications are operated:
Backend
.NET Core Web API, Database access via EntityFramework Core, graphql-dotnet Server
Frontend
Typescript, React, Apollo GraphQL Client
Jobs
Isolated (containerised) dotnet Azure Functions Host, which executes recurring jobs as a task scheduler (as API calls to the backend)
Technical infrastructure at the customer
Technical infrastructure at the customer
The software consists of three sub-applications (backend, frontend, jobs), which are deployed as separate pods on an AKS cluster. The backend and jobs pods are in turn divided into two containers: the actual application and one nginx sidecar container each, which serves as an upstream reverse proxy. A total of 3 environments are actively used: Production, Quality and Training, with Quality and Training running on a separate cluster.
The applications are configured via kubernetes config maps.
An Azure SQL database is used as the database.
Deployments, builds and various maintenance steps of the database are mapped via Azure DevOps pipelines or releases (CI/CD).
Development takes place on a provided Windows VM.
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