Improved inventory management for UK's leading car dealership

Our client distributes spare parts for Ferrari and Maserati. The company used an old web platform for searching and selling the car parts. However, the old dealership management system was hard to handle and had inefficient reporting capabilities. The system consisted of a number of websites and third-party solutions that all shared one inventory database, which stored over 285,000 parts.

To solve the problem, our client decided to split it into an admin site and a customer site. Their on-site engineers and individual contractors had been trying to re-develop the system for eight years.

N-iX was already engaged in one of the company's projects that was progressing smoothly. So the client decided to involve N-iX experts into the project to improve the architecture and performance of the system and add new functionality.

As our client needed to undergo digital transformation, we used the following approach:

• Identified technological challenges and goals
• Analyzed the legacy system
• Created a digital transformation roadmap
• Set up Agile processes focusing on ultimate customer experience
• Supported the digital solutions

We applied the incremental development approach and ensured uninterrupted performance of the solution. Our team analyzed the entire ecosystem, which contained five applications, making sure that all old parts of the system would work appropriately with any new changes.

Our team developed the UI/UX design of the solution using Figma. The new design was intended to make the system more user-friendly. The team of three business analysts managed the entire business flows from the idea to the implementation, staying in regular contact with stakeholders.

Our experts have helped the client migrate the platform from the legacy code. We refactored the parts that were originally written in ASP.NET MVC and jQuery and rewrote one of the websites of the system that was written in Web Forms. Our team has been gradually refactoring all components of the system to WebApi and React. Also, we have been using Docker to facilitate and speed up development.

The client's platform helps maintain stores with different car parts, generating a lot of reports on usage, views, stock quantity, management of prices, etc. The admin part (an ERP management system) of the solution contains information on warehouses, discounts, finances, reporting, etc. The customer-facing site consists of the online shop, purchases, and payments.

Our team decided to divide the implementation process into several phases that wouldn’t interrupt the client's business flows:

• Basic stock management
• User/customer records
• The sales process (the admin and customer site)
• Reporting (actions based on report results were manual (e.g., if the stock quantity for some part is less than 3 — need to manually order more))
• Final implementations

We set up the granular approach to system modernization and ensured uninterrupted performance of the system. Our team upgraded the legacy code and implemented new functionality for stock and warehouse management, accounting, logistics, and all other processes needed for car parts management. Our experts built a brand-new UI/ UX design, following the latest industry trends. Also, we created a comprehensive user manual for the new system, which describes all business flows and permissions.