ERP Development for the Automotive Dealership Service Provider

Client

Our client is a German-based company that develops digital applications for cars trade. They needed an internal tool for HR management, storing employee information, meetings booking, and data synchronization. They addressed Elinext (among others) to complete the task within the allocated timeframe and budget, and we turned out to be the best option for the job.

Project Description

As we mentioned, our customer needed an ERP that would let one manage human resource, contain employee information, allow meeting booking, and data synchronization. The initial request included the ask for ERP that would allow to:

Manage employee information
Manage & book meetings
Manage workspace
Synchronize calendar from Outlook & Kerio

Our team was chosen after a series of tests, which included live coding tests, and interviews, and we turned out to be the best out of the multiple options they had. We stood out among the competitors due to being responsible, possessing high-level skills, being committed to the task, and being willing to contribute.

Among the demands we’ve got from our customers were good availability & scalability of output source code, on-time delivery, and we kept out to those demands.

Challenges

We were to comlete the following taksa for the company’s ERP system

Implement recurrence meeting booking in FullCalendar
Upgrade from PHP 5.6 -> PHP 8.2
Implement Synchronization between Outlook, Outlook Exchange & Kerio Calendar
Implement cron to tunning data every day after synchronization
Implement cron to notify company’s event & employees’ birthdays.

The main priorities were quality, availability, and scalability of the output source code.

Process

As we connected with the customer, it got to us that they don’t have the manpower to complete the task of building their own ERP, and they’re willing to outsource the job to a reliable software supplier. They put us through several coding tests and held a series of interviews, and we were selected to proceed with them as our efforts seemed more fitting for the job than our competitors, so we started the cooperation.

Within the process of development we started using the library to upgrade the PHP version from 5.4 to 8.2 then retested everything manually and fixed issues as they arose.

Then we developed a new plugin for FullCalendar to handle recurring event, and wrote an JQuery plugin to interact with FullCalendar. After that, we developed a backend PHP API to retrieve/store recurring event data in the database. Our team also wrote PHP functions to synchronize events from Outlook & Kerio to the system calendar. We interacted with Pusher to create real-time push notifications.

Solution

We chose this PHP upgrade version as it was qualified by Github and was suggested by the client. This version enabled clear logs of the process. We chose PHP & JQuery since this tech stack was used in the previous version of an existing system so we needed to follow those technologies.

For the solution, our team made the following adjustments:

Upgraded PHP Version

PHP version 8.2 performs much better than PHP 5.6, and allows speeding up the application, providing a better user experience.

FullCalendar Recurring Events Creation Enabled

Within the ERP system, one could create events on FullCalendar, including recurring events, much like it’s done on a regular Google Calendar.

Events Synchronization

Our engineers made synchronization of the calendar events from both Outlook and Kerio possible.

Realtime Notifications

Our engineers ensured that the system would remind users about upcoming calendar events would be enabled. That way, the HR department is always updated about colleagues’ birthdays, for instance.

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The application was deployed to an Azure VM instance and connected to PostgreSQL which is deployed on another instance. User authentication and authorization were managed by Azure LDAP SSO. Third parties included Pusher, Outlook & Kerio API.

Results

As a result of cooperation with a German car trade digital solutions supplier, we delivered some key adjustments to their ERP system. It is now used within the company. Among the adjustments we’ve managed to make were an upgraded tech stack, improved events synchronizations, and calendar synchronization.

The software is now used by a company with 500+ employees and helps them in their daily operations immensely. We got positive feedback from them on our work on their ERP, and hope for future projects with them.