After Sales Platform

Description

Serving over 2,500 customers throughout Europe is not an easy task, especially when considering the need to orchestrate deliveries and pickups with different logistics partners in many different countries. Furthermore, JD Europe’s portfolio comprises of more than 1,000 articles that need to be distinguished by color, year of production and OEM partner when answering requests for service. Adding the need to identify whether a returned part is still under warranty or not, and the data to be respected over the course of a service process along with respective business rules tend to get rather complex.
In addition, JD Europe aimed to extend their service offering portfolio which made it crucial to implement a solution that was easily extendable in the future. It should  allow to interconnect applications that will add specific information for bikes to enrich the available data for the bikes and for the parts over an articles lifecycle.

General Information

Business Need: Serving over 2,500 customers throughout Europe is not an easy task, especially when considering the need to orchestrate deliveries and pickups with different logistics partners in many different countries. Furthermore, JD Europe’s portfolio comprises of more than 1,000 articles that need to be distinguished by color, year of production and OEM partner when answering requests for service. Adding the need to identify whether a returned part is still under warranty or not, and the data to be respected over the course of a service process along with respective business rules tend to get rather complex.
In addition, JD Europe aimed to extend their service offering portfolio which made it crucial to implement a solution that was easily extendable in the future. It should  allow to interconnect applications that will add specific information for bikes to enrich the available data for the bikes and for the parts over an articles lifecycle.

Solution: Together with JD Europe, Mansystems analysed JD Eurorpe's current situation and found out what exactly JD needed as a solution. They needed something that did not exist in their company at that moment, as they needed an individual and specific application especially tailored for them and especially adjusted to their needs. As an innovative company that stands for and supports digitalisation and innovation, Mansystems was perfect for this project.

What JD really needed was an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. But this ERP system should not be as any other standard solution. JD and Mansystems designed the core processes and defined the requirements towards the ERP system interface. In order to deliver a working solution very quickly, we adapted an agile approach to project management, software development and implementation. We steadily delivered a new version of the application in order to get customer feedback as soon as possible. The team highly benefitted from the extensive feature set of the Mendix platform and its high degree of flexibility as a data driven application, which left valuable time to implement custom modules such as a Price list Management, Ware house Management and Invoice Management.
 
Mansystems leveraged the Mendix App Platform to rapidly deliver the new solution. By collaborating across the customer’s different business departments, Mansystems built a solution which met all of JD Europe’s expectations. Mendix’s model-driven development capabilities made it easy to graphically design, build and iterate based on end-user feedback, much faster in comparison to programming.

By using the Mendix rapid development platform, Mansystems was able to develop fast in agile short sprints, show the first results very quickly and react directly to changing requirements. Because of these special features of the Mendix platform, it was possible for Mansystems and JD Europe to constantly exchange information and work together at all times.

Results: Mansystems developed an individually tailored ERP solution for JD Europe in form of an Mendix application. 

JD was very satisfied with the result, because now customers are able to post their service requests over different channels, including email, telephone, fax and the new Customer Portal – the latter allowing to easily follow the progress of a specific request. Before having the ERP system built with Mendix, JD had big problems communicating with their customers. It was very difficult to track all requests and to directly have an overview of all information about a customer when he or she called because of an issue. Now all employees of JD Europe are able to have all information of a specific customer ready, when he or she gets in touch with JD. 
 
JD is empowered to quickly respond to customer inquiries – be it a new spare parts order or looking up the current state of a bike repair. All processes are related to one another, e.g. allowing JD to create a spare parts order as a solution for an issue ticket opened by a customer. These process relations make life easy when analyzing difficult service cases.
Customers are also able to directly order spare parts themselves.
 
Invoices as well as Credit Notes are automatically being created based on process data, of course related to the respective tickets; management reports can easily be created by executing the customized reports provided within the solution's Report Module; and all relevant data is replicated in the ERP system over an interface based on web-services.
 
With this solution, JD Europe now profits from a central repository where all relevant data is quickly available, as well from a process guiding framework that ensures steady service delivery on a very high level of quality.
Using Mansystem's ERP system, JD Europe was able to double their revenue within a very short time.