Scaling Digital Transformation in Automotive Technology with SaaS Platform

The client is a leading automotive technology company with over 70 years of experience in the development and optimization of powertrain systems for various sectors including passenger cars, commercial vehicles, construction, locomotive, aviation, and marine. The company employs over 10,000 people and has more than 45 engineering centers across the globe. The company has a complex organizational structure with multiple independent departments, each developing a number of standalone solutions for internal use and customer projects.

The client, a leading automotive technology company, was facing challenges in standardizing and streamlining the development of products across different departments. The company's complex organizational structure, comprising multiple independent departments, each developing standalone solutions for internal use and customer projects, was leading to redundancy and inefficiency. Some of these applications had similar features, but there was no mechanism to reuse applications with similar functionality. The client needed to build a SaaS platform to address these issues and reduce costs. However, before embarking on this large and costly project, the company needed to validate the product idea, measure its ROI, and mitigate potential risks. They also needed expertise in cloud software development.

N-iX, a technology solutions provider, helped the client validate the feasibility of the SaaS platform. They conducted two Discovery Phases - the main Discovery phase focused on the product and a Business Strategy Discovery focused on its business value. N-iX experts prepared a comparative analysis of two scenarios: a case when a department develops a solution with the help of the SaaS platform and the case when it develops a solution on its own. This analysis helped the client understand the initial investment required for platform development and the potential savings a department could achieve by developing its solution on the platform. N-iX also prepared a detailed product requirements specification that describes the project, its goals, features, the optimum technology stack, and architecture overview. They built UX/UI prototypes of the cloud-based SaaS platform and a benchmarking app hosted on it, and estimated the time and money needed to turn the idea into an MVP or a full-fledged product.

• The client was able to validate the feasibility of the SaaS platform and gain a clear understanding of the potential ROI. The Discovery Phases conducted by N-iX provided a high-level project plan with clear functional requirements, built UX/UI prototypes of the cloud-based SaaS platform and a benchmarking app hosted on it. The client received all the necessary deliverables to kick off the implementation phase successfully, including templates to evaluate whether it is more profitable to develop a solution on its SaaS platform or invest in the development of a certain type of service. The benchmarking solution hosted on a SaaS platform integrates all available vehicle benchmarks previously researched by the client, providing a more efficient and streamlined process.

• Reduction of man-hours by 1.5 times if the application is hosted on the platform rather than developed on its own, leading to long-term operating cost savings.

• Replacement of the two-week manual process of preparing the benchmarking reports for customers.

• Enabling internal application users to publish new benchmark reports, update pricing, and manage a customer’s access based on subscriptions purchase.