Customised CRM and ERP Development
DS³ - DirectSelling Support Software GmbH
DiSellCo's legacy system manages orders, deliveries, accounting, and commission tracking through a desktop application used in the warehouse for handling orders and shipping. This application also facilitates customer billing for subscriptions and other orders, alongside generating various reports and notifications.
However, the existing system faced several challenges. There were too many components, with the desktop application and web application each maintaining their own databases. This required the establishment of syncing mechanisms, leading to data duplication and inconsistencies. Numerous SQL jobs were utilized for importing data from other systems, but these jobs occasionally failed, causing many orders to be overlooked. Additionally, the process of generating genealogy data was slow due to an unoptimized data structure, and the deployment process was lengthy, often taking a week to prepare after multiple testing simulations.
In response to these issues, the client requested a complete overhaul of the application, consolidating it into a single system to eliminate multiple databases and the desktop application. We implemented the latest practices and adopted a microservices-based architecture on the Azure platform, which simplified the onboarding of new developers since they don’t need to grasp the entire application at once. Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services were employed to orchestrate deployments, and automation significantly reduced the time required to set up simulation environments. For genealogy management, we utilized the Cosmos database with the Gremlin API as a graph database, allowing for quicker retrieval of hierarchical data. Leveraging Azure and continuous integration also lowered costs related to hardware and server management. This new system is entirely web-based, providing the added benefit of being Software as a Service (SaaS).