Challenges
ARaymond, is one of the world’s leading suppliers of fastening and assembly solutions. For more than 150 years, they have been offering high-end products for the international market. Their internal business processes were no longer adapted to the business needs and they were looking to digitize some steps.
ARaymond wanted to develop an application portfolio in order to digitize its internal and external processes for:
- Optimize performance and modernize business processes
- Offer an innovative experience to its internal and external users
- Develop reusable services to standardize and centralize access to internal data
Approach
Focus on the user experience
We first worked on the user experience aspect with our UX expert. This first phase allowed us to identify the business processes where digitization would have the highest added value. We then collaborated in the selection of priority processes to be implemented and in the definition of a sustainable software architecture following best practices.
Sustainable enterprise architecture, a technical foundation of reusable bricks
Convinced by the domain-oriented approach (DDD) and the microservices approach, we identified a set of common components to be developed in order to constitute a standardized technical base within ARaymond’s IT. Thanks to the SaaS solutions of the Azure cloud, we have implemented a Single Sign On (SSO) system, access to a Document Management System (DMS), emailing, and notifications that can be reused by all business applications.
Identity and access management
Thanks to Azure’s identity federation services, Azure B2C, we have integrated a unified central system allowing ARaymond to manage its internal and external users. This allows for easy access to future applications. We have extended the user profiles to adapt them to our client’s business needs with a .NET Core application. This functionality allows teams to govern internal and external user access in a central tool.
Business applications
Equipped with a set of core technical components, we were able to develop applications focused on ARaymond’s functionalities and business:
- Customer platform
The first business process identified for digitization was the monitoring of customer projects. CBTW teams developed a collaborative web application: The Customer Platform. Developed in Java/Vue.js, this web application allows ARaymond’s customers to connect and track their projects, while the sales representative can update elements such as the life cycle, stages, exchanges, etc.
- Digital Flagship China – 21 Vianet
Then, using the same technologies, we developed a web application for ARaymond China. Indeed, Araymond wanted to present its product catalog dedicated to the Chinese market. We developed a responsive web application in Vue.js, and an API server hosted in Azure with the following methodology:
- Design of the user journey and user interfaces
- Implementation of a continuous delivery chain to deploy automatically in a Test environment allowing regular validation by ARaymond.
- Deployment and support in Production environment.
Benefits
These web applications allow to give more visibility to all the actors involved in the projects. Moreover, these applications have been developed taking into account the future needs of our client:
Collaborative web application for project management
- A set of reusable components
- An information system deployed on the Azure cloud for on-demand scaling
- An Azure Devops software factory to industrialize software production.
Web application for the Chinese market
- An architecture designed to be integrated later with ARaymond CRM and Identity Provider.
- The ability to deploy the application on Chinese territory to have good performance when accessing the application from China.
- Azure Cognitive Service provides a turnkey solution to implement a full text search in the product catalog.
Technologies & Partners
To solve our client’s problems we used the following services provided by the Azure Cloud Platform: APP Service, Azure search, Azure IAM/B2C, Managed databases, Azure Storage and Azure DEVOPS.
