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Customer Story

Serverless Improves Automotive SaaS Solution at Fraction of Cost

In automating its serverless platform using the AWS Cloud to meet the automotive industry’s needs, metrologx gained widely applicable cost and performance benefits

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.

Why
To maintain its position in the automotive industry, metrologx's needed a new platform to meet a primary client's needs
What
The company used Xebia’s AWS expertise to implement serverless solution
How
Greater automation and flexibility gave the client better, more stable performance at a lower cost

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.

“The high flexibility and nearly infinite scalability of the solution – born out of automation and a Serverless configuration – has enabled us to use it with a whole host of automotive industry clients, maximizing our business potential.”
metrologx
Manuel Horn Lead Solution Architect, Metrologx.

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.

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