Car Dealer CRM Optimization

Country: Estonia
The  Estonian  company  Modera  develops software  for  car  dealers  and  the  automotive industry. Its CRM system is used by thousands of  car  dealerships  around  the  world,  and among  its  customers  are  Nissan,  Renault Group,  Kia  Motors,  Honda  Motor,  Mercedes-Benz,  Toyota  Motor  Corporation,  and  many others.
  1. Challenge

    Modera's CRM includes sales and logistics management, document management and interaction with customers, cooperation with test drives, warehouses, etc. Most of the platform's API was written by the internal development team manually. This imposes certain restrictions in terms of further development and scaling. It became increasingly difficult to add new features and optimize the system for each client.

    It was decided to move CRM to the flexible API Platform framework, which would allow system unification and automation of most of the further work. Since the main development team of Modera was busy supporting the existing platform and adding new functionality to it, the company turned to Sibedge experts for assistance.
  2. Approach

    Immersion into the Project

    At the first stages of development, the client's Product Owner was heavily loaded, so Sibedge engineers had to study the project independently. Given the complexity of the system, it took the developers about two months to immerse into the architecture and study the existing code. Through the efforts of the project coordinator on the part of Sibedge, effective communication was established between the client and the developers, after which the speed of work increased significantly.

    API Platform Advantages

    The original CRM system was mostly self-made, while using the Symfony framework and the FriendsOfSymfony toolset. The transition to the API Platform framework made it possible to simplify and automate what developers previously had to do manually. For example, you can automatically generate documentation and models, unify filters, add event systems, serialize resources, create your own controllers, and much more.

    Optimization

    After API Platform was implemented into the system, everything became unified and brought to a single standard. But the migration main advantage the was the support for the GraphQL data query syntax. Now the database queries are reduced by more than half, which has increased the overall speed of the system and has reduced the load on the server hardware. Sibedge engineers also identified and fixed several bugs and shortcomings of the system, which should have a positive impact on the further expansion of its functionality.

    Team and Technologies

    Two backend developers were involved in the project. The technology stack, in addition to Symfony and API Platform, included PHP, MySQL, Whaler, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Amazon Web Services. Our team worked on the project for 5 months.
  3. Result

    The old version of Modera's CRM is still used by many of its customers. But now, with an updated system based on the API Platform framework, a gradual transition to it will be carried out. The work done by Sibedge engineers clearly demonstrates that the platform can be even faster and more convenient for users — saving them time and reducing the cost of technical support. The platform has also become more convenient for developers: support for third-party systems has expanded, requests have been brought to a single form, etc.

    The client was satisfied with Sibedge developers contribution to the system improvement, which included many errors search and elimination. Despite the fact that in the beginning there were difficulties with the engineers immersion into the code base, by the end of the day all problems were eliminated and the parties found a way to effective interaction. In future, Modera plans to continue cooperation with Sibedge to further improve its platform.
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Industry:

Information technology

Duration:

5 months

Team:

  • 2 - Back-end
  • 1 - Project Manager

Technologies:

Detail project
The  Estonian  company  Modera  develops software  for  car  dealers  and  the  automotive industry. Its CRM system is used by thousands of  car  dealerships  around  the  world,  and among  its  customers  are  Nissan,  Renault Group,  Kia  Motors,  Honda  Motor,  Mercedes-Benz,  Toyota  Motor  Corporation,  and  many others.
Duration:
5 months
Team:
  • 2 - Back-end
  • 1 - Project Manager