Key Challenges
Our client is a renowned supplier of car and parts manufacturers and serves almost all international car manufacturers. With 27 production sites, products are for export around the globe, half of them being sold to Eastern European manufacturers.
Aside from the automotive industry, they also innovate for a wide range of other industries, delivering fastening and assembly solutions for diverse manufactured goods.
With business in China, our client had a storefront product catalog used by B2B Chinese clients to place their orders. All the processes were manual: each part had to be ordered through a form which then trigged a sales process.
While this method certainly worked, it was neither efficient nor customer friendly. Our client therefore asked our help to turn this product inventory website into a richer B2B e-commerce platform, allowing Chinese customers to place, pay and track their orders online.
Our Approach
There were 3 challenges to tackle:
- Integrate the application with the payment platform Alipay
- Integrate the application with the API of Shentong, a shipment-tracking platform
- Find a local product owner with knowledge of Chinese consumption habits
We started off by building a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary hybrid team with experts from Positive Thinking Company, 21 Vianet Blue Cloud and the client both in France and China. The composition of this project team spread over the continents allowed the client to access a local product vision that included knowledge of the Chinese market requirements, and the global picture and technical skills in Europe.
The team in China was composed of:
- A developer (21Vianet Blue Cloud)
- A tech lead (21Vianet Blue Cloud)
- A product owner (21Vianet Blue Cloud)
- A business owner (client)
The team in France was composed of:
- A product owner
- A team coordinator (Positive Thinking Company)
- A touchpoint at the client
Project team composition
Our Software Product Engineering teams modified the back office so that the client’s logistics operators could fill in the package tracking number from the moment they generated it. This number is then used to query the parcel tracking APIs in China (Shentong) and visually propose to the user to track his parcel in real time in the application.
Architecture of the new e-commerce platform
Together, the teams successfully implemented the new required features: online payment (with Alipay) and shipment tracking (with Shentong), but there is more to come.
As part of a long-term partnership, Positive Thinking Company, 21 Vianet and our client will continue working to propose the integration of new features to the e-commerce application, targeted to the Chinese market.
The backlog is expanding fast, and experts are already working on the next big new feature : synchronising the Chinese application with the product portfolio of the headquarters in Europe.
The objective will be to integrate our client’s Information System in China with the one in Europe, in particular with SAP, their inventory system.
This project gives rise to a whole new set of challenges including all regulatory and technical constraints related to the cross border transfer of data to and from China.
Benefits
We transformed a simple product inventory website into a fully business-ready platform, fitted with features adapted to the Chinese market. Manual processes are now a thing of the past and customer experience has improved quite substantially.
We tackled our client main challenges which was the lack of technical knowledge to integrate the components of a standard e-commerce application in China.
Thanks to our
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