Client
Profile
The Client is a highly reputable European automotive brand producing luxury and commercial vehicles. Above all, the company gained global recognition for delivering market-leading commercial passenger cars. Besides that, the company’s product range also includes large-sized vehicles — trucks and buses — that are widely used in passenger transportation and cargo shipping across the world.
About the Project
The project represents a fully-featured online car selling ecommerce platform targeted at an international audience. It allows the car buyers to:
- Browse through the gallery of available car models;
- Select preferred vehicles with the right delivery version / completion;
- Find information on purchase and delivery terms;
- Process online payments
and much more…
The platform is also closely integrated with the internal ERP-system of the car producer which handles order processing, product inventory and many other critical business aspects.
Project
Challenges
The Client managed to build a large team of experienced IT specialists. The team is distributed and includes both in-house employees and development units allocated from 3rd-party vendors.
At some point the management team decided that improvements needed to be made in terms of architecture design, development process coordination and the roll-out process for newly developed software modules and updates. The Client started looking for an appropriate vendor who’d help to mitigate these gaps.
Why GP Solutions?
As a flagship company in the industry on a global scale, the Client set up a rigorous vendor selection process. Nevertheless, GP Solutions was ultimately awarded with the right to take part in the project and help solve the above-stated challenges. It was largely due to our ability to demonstrate the following during the evaluation stage:
- In-depth knowledge of best practices in software architecture, DevOps, and complex ERP solutions;
- Capacity to allocate highly experienced engineers with at least 10 years of background in software development;
- Successful use cases of launching projects for different markets internationally (our team has participated in software development projects for customers from over 30 countries worldwide).
Solutions and Services Provided
Software Architecture Development
The nature of the project was very complex and multi-faceted. It was ultimately planned to be released for 31 different markets worldwide. The Client’s approach was to offer a unique customer experience for each target market. In particular, each country version of the platform had to take into account:
Regional product inventory specifics
The range of offered vehicles for each country had to include its own specific range of car models available for the buyers.
Multiple user experience peculiarities
Besides localization into different languages, some markets (especially in the Asia-Pacific region) had plenty of unique requirements regarding user workflows, look & feel, etc. All of them were to be carefully taken care of and reflected in the final product for maximum effect.
Multiple business models
Each market had certain specifics in terms of product distribution and sales workflows. All of them had to be properly explored and arranged in the form of documented requirements.
Such a complex effort demanded an elaborate and high-performing system architecture. Thus, our company allocated a dedicated Software Architect at the Client’s request in order to help design it. The allocated expert was one of our most experienced employees with over 20 years of software development background. He is well-versed in the key project tech stack, which includes:
- Java programming language as the main back-end technology;
- Vue.js framework of JavaScript for front-end development part;
- Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) — a powerful digital asset management system utilized for web-content display and processing.
Our architect established a close collaboration with the key project stakeholders, collecting as much project-critical information as possible. As of October 2022, he’s been successfully conducting detailed analysis of the project documentation, technical and business requirements provided by software integration managers on the Client’s side for over 6 months. The data he assembles are then converted by him into detailed solution plans and specifications. The architect also runs them through the approval process with the project management prior to the development stage.
Development Process Coordination
Besides solution design and development, our architect has been playing one of the key roles in coordinating the development. He takes an active part in the preparation of specific project tasks for the development team. This is done in close cooperation with the responsible development team managers on the Client’s side. As the project team counts over 200 people split into a number of units, this is quite a complicated and labor-intensive bit of work.
On top of it all, the architect also assists in choosing appropriate task assignees, helping to run the development process faster.
DevOps Activities
Another part of the job for GP Solutions was to assist in setting up a continuous delivery and roll-out process for the newly developed software modules, features, and updates. This particular activity posed many technical challenges because of the highly complex software architecture and the large project team size.
This project area was entrusted to a dedicated Senior DevOps Engineer. He made a huge contribution to updating the software development environment. He also optimized the assembly process for production software builds. Currently (as of October 2022) he continues to dedicate his skill and knowledge for the Client’s benefit, making sure the roll-out process goes on smoothly and with minimum downtime periods.
Project Results
Overall, the expertise and professionalism of our dedicated employees had a strong positive effect. The Client managed to release product versions for 10 markets internationally within 6 months after the start of cooperation with GP Solutions.
The upcoming short-term plan (as of October 2022) is to release the remaining market versions of the e-commerce platform.
In addition, new cooperation opportunities are also under consideration.