The Idea:
The classical auto industry has reached its peak at the moment, and people are starting to diversify into other things, such as electric cars, or racing cars for civilians or self-driving cars. Either way you slice it, the industry itself is changing.
The one thing that is not changing at the moment is the fact that these vehicles require maintenance, and that’s where Autowass comes in.
A complete, brand new marketplace specially designed for car lovers, mechanics and service centers. Everything in one place, right at your fingertips.
This represented a huge opportunity for the industry as a whole. Service centers could serve their customers at their doorstep, instead of having them come to their physical location. This simple software solution for the automotive industry has completely changed the game as we knew it.
Now people could register their cars on this new custom software solution and do all sorts of things with it. Just like in a real marketplace. From programming a meeting at a local service to get all the paperwork needed for them to drive it to maintenance. Checking parts availability, buying, selling, providing services etc. You name it!
When it comes to car service, the software application allows the business to process the request, and sends the data to the technician so he knows exactly what he needs to do. No more errors and guesses when it comes to work like this.
It gives you the opportunity to manage your business and everything that goes inside, from your phone.
But what happens if your car needs a brand new piece of equipment? We’ve taken care of that one too! If your car needs a new piece in order to work, you can select one from the software application itself. It shows you a list of similar pieces with the prices. All it’s based on the original bar code that the piece has.
But how did a software solution for the automotive industry, such as this one, get developed? For that let’s take a look at the programming languages that we’ve used.
Programming languages used:
API – Spring Boot: Spring Boot was used as the main technology for creating RESTful microservices on the backend side
WEB – Angular: The web client is represented by an Angular 11 SPA client that consumes the exposed APIs
MOBILE – Flutter: Flutter was used for creating the mobile experience for both iOS and Android users
INFRA – GCP and Firebase: Google Cloud Platform was the cloud service for hosting the APIs and Firebase was used as a convenient way of hosting the web SPA.
The Software Application:
This software application operates a lot for the B2B2C industry type. Meaning that it serves both the B2B industry by allowing all of the car service owners to all come in one place. This promotes competition among businesses and the end consumer is the one that ends up winning the most.
For the person that is owning the car this presents a tremendous advantage. Since he no longer needs to drive the car to the auto-service and have it repaired there, he wins time; the technician comes to your house to fix it. You can schedule a convenient time for yourself and even check the prices of different pieces or services within the software application.
This custom software solution made specifically for business process automation is a multi-actor system. It is composed of a set of client applications (web, android and iOS) that serves actors as well as service providers, consultants, accountants and many more… This application consumes a suite of distributed and scalable microservices based on APIs in order to offer a fully aggregated experience.
Just like any good story, it wouldn’t be complete with some of the trials that we faced along the way. For instance, the delivery time for this custom software solution was just 7 months. That’s quite short! On top of that you throw a small budget with super high-level specifications, and a fully 100% completed application to start shortly before Christmas? And those were just some of the challenges that we were presented with.
If you know anything about the software industry, you know that when a new project starts, you need people. People that can get the job done. And during these specific times, almost nobody wanted to do it. So finding people was very difficult.
Considering this unique type of situation, we’ve had to operate differently from what we’ve been doing so far. Starting from requirement elaboration, to UX design, architecture, development, testing and deployment, this software application was built. So what was to be done here?
We’ve assembled a team of 14 people for this custom software application and we’ve started to work on it. I mentioned earlier that the deadline for its completion was 7 months. It took 8 months in total.
We took care of the entire manufacturing process of this custom software solution for business process automation. All the way from the very raw idea phase to an entire, fully working application. And the best part is that you can use this software application regardless if you are a soldier in the Android VS Mac war or you are simply a PC lover.
At abac, we take on technical challenges that sometimes are absolutely against all odds, in the scope of pushing innovation to new levels. We literally lived for the project until it came to fruition, and we’re willing to do this again for any project that has the will to change the world.
