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
Customer
1st Tier Automotive Supplier
Field of Work
Automotive
to Website
Technologies
C#
.Net
GraphQL
React
TypeScript
Kubernetes
Docker
Azure DevOps
Azure AKS
MSSQL
Digitalisierung der Markt- und Unternehmensplanung eines Automobilzulieferers

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

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
  • 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

Focus-Technologies

Kubernetes_logo_without_workmark
Kubernetes
C sharp logo
C#
Image
React
docker-logo-mark-blue
Docker
GraphQL_Logo
GraphQL

Other Technologies

.Net
TypeScript
MSSQL
Azure DevOps
Azure AKS

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

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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