Customer

euro delkredere was founded in 1999 and is today one of the leading independent central regulation institutes in Germany and the D-A-CH region with an annual regulation turnover in the double-digit billion range. The company offers a comprehensive product portfolio covering all aspects of central settlements, del credere insurance and import insurance. Ultimately, euro delkredere thus takes over the settlement of due and outstanding supplier receivables and, in the future, further services in the area of supply chain finance for around 200 customers and 20,000 suppliers.

Challenge

As part of euro delkredere‘s digitization strategy, the existing system landscape is to be modernized and existing business processes optimized in order to consolidate the successful business model. In the first step, it is intended to generate corresponding added value and greater customer loyalty via a web portal solution for customers. In addition, the aim is to improve market positioning by expanding the product portfolio.

In the course of an extensive selection process, euro delkredere has chosen PRODYNA as a dependable IT partner to implement a solution on the basis of new and modern technologies. All prerequisites are now in place to continue to offer both new and pre-existing customers an optimal and customized product portfolio in a challenging environment.

A subsequent goal of this project was to reduce manual effort for employees and thereby improve their daily working efficiency. The associated streamlining of existing work processes could create scope for growth while maintaining an interesting and varied working environment.

Ultimately, euro delkredere‘s efforts were aimed at laying the foundations of a cloud infrastructure to enable a future migration of core systems in order to replace expensive hardware costs with the flexible billing model of cloud resources (outsourcing of infrastructure).

Screenshot 1: The customer Mall Corp can now report regulated positions and data directly to euro delkredere. This will help to digitize the workflow and provide the customer with data to which he previously had no access.

Solution

For the first step, the decision was made to set up a web portal based on state-of-the-art technologies within the framework of a microservice architecture: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container orchestration in Microsoft‘s Azure Cloud. While Terraform enables uncomplicated handling of the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure (infrastructure as code), Keycloak leaves nothing to be desired in terms of identity and access management when implementing single sign-on. The microservices developed with Spring offer secure REST interfaces for communication with the Angular front-end via JSON Web Token.

The intended migration to the cloud brought a number of advantages, such as a shift in IT infrastructure costs from investment (capex) to operating costs (opex). Coupled with the «pay as you go» payment method, the direct allocation of costs created the perfect basis for mechanisms such as horizontal scaling of portal services, paving the way for the creation of an application without availability or performance bottlenecks. The use of Managed Storage (Database as a Service) made a fully maintained and backed-up database available with just a few clicks.

On an organizational level, the new web portal enables a high degree of standardization in the exchange of data with other companies. New functionalities such as research functions and the provision of archived data also increase system usability. For example, the introduction of a self-service area for customers (goods recipients and their suppliers) means that they can now view their invoice notifications completely independently. This drastically shortens customers‘ access times to their own data and enables euro delkredere employees to do away with previously manual processes. Since then, the resulting freedom has been successfully used to consolidate existing business relationships and develop new ones. The connection of two Fintech modules additionally increases the attractiveness of the newly created portal for existing and new customers. This expands the existing euro delkredere service   offering rounds off the existing portfolio and thus enables the development of new sales potential.

Since user centric design and quality customer experience are nowadays the cornerstones for successful web applications, a UX Consultant of the PRODYNA Communication Design unit complemented the development team during all project phases. In this way, an ultra-modern user portal was created, which impresses with its clear design and intuitive usability.

Screenshot 2: Excerpt from the User Management section. For the first time, euro delkredere has a user self-service tool and the opportunity to help customers directly if problems arise.

Screenshot 3: The customer Mall Corp has created an event for its excess liquidity. The suppliers can offer a discount on their invoice to give them the possibility of early payment. This is called „dynamic discounting“.

Result

With the completion of the web portal, including modularly connected additional functionalities, euro delkredere has taken the first step in its digitization strategy for a sustainable future. By using modern programming languages and taking advantage of innovative concepts in cloud computing, the company is now in a position to create flexible user interfaces quickly and easily and to connect external systems via interfaces. Furthermore, the horizontal scalability of the microservices allows us to react directly to short-term load peaks and thus to guarantee available and reliable results. Accordingly, the introduction of new products has created real added value, making them significantly more attractive to both existing and new customers.