Related services
Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Industry
Transport | Trade | Logistics
Company
Xebia
For more than 25 years, the team at metrologx GmbH has offered a variety of consulting services and tools for well-known customers in the automotive industry. The company runs a Software as a Service solution for the automotive supply chain, and its award-winning and innovative software framework, factoryworkx, is a fully managed, cloud-based software solution. Its major client, a spare parts supplier for vehicle manufacturers, relies on metrologx’s expertise in developing SaaS applications to optimize its Just-in-Time parts delivery service and keep up with industry standards. Therefore metrologx needed to develop state-of-the-art cloud transformations beyond traditional managed services.
Client’s Business Need Drives Upgrade
The growing business requirements of an automotive parts client meant that metrologx needed to enhance its SaaS solution via the cloud. The client needed to provide vehicle-specific configuration parts lists to its customers using EDI-as-a-service, which the existing system no longer supported.
Within the automotive industry, penalty charges can amount to thousands of euros per minute of downtime, so it was essential that as well as being future-proof and scalable, metrologx’s new platform was highly available and, therefore, fully automated. The company approached Xebia to assist in improving its SaaS solutions using AWS Cloud to achieve that unwavering performance.
Continuity Essential to Service Quality
Millions of EDI messages are sent between manufacturers and metrologx’s client every day, making serverless the clear option. The platform’s architecture was managed using AWS CLI, and a solution using five AWS Lambda functions was developed to accelerate the ordering process. The most complex and important of these was the retry ordering process, notifying users of any order failures and ensuring continuous production at automobile factories.
Automated testing and infrastructure management provided metrologx quality assurance, and this automated delivery pipeline meant zero-downtime deployments, essential to the client’s needs. As a safeguard, the development teams used AWS CloudWatch to monitor performance and ensure immediate supplier error notifications.
A Cost-Effective Solution Built for the Future
With Xebia’s assistance, metrologx successfully developed and live-launched the order process optimization solution in just four weeks. Increased automation across the platform and accelerated order processing have led to lower server usage overall, meaning supply chain platform costs are just one percent of comparable solutions.
At the same time, this scalable, resilient and secure solution provides the basis for metrologx to increase its own business offering. The company can now transform all EDI mappings to this serverless system, allowing clients with similar business needs the most technologically advanced and innovative business applications.