Track and Trace for a Global Automotive Manufacturer

A global automotive manufacturer needed to modernize a mainframe monolith, the system behind their Vehicle Monitor and Control System (VMACS), into something that could give them end-to-end visibility across their outbound supply chain: every vehicle, every carrier, every route segment, from factory completion to dealership arrival

They agreed the next iteration needed to be developed using proven software architecture design principles, like Domain-Driven Design, CQRS, and Event Sourcing. Rather than build and maintain an in-house framework, they sought a purpose-built, open-source foundation for event-driven architecture, with a hard bar: flexible and scalable, enterprise security, high availability, and fully auditable.

Successfully implementing these design patterns and leveraging Axon Framework and Axon Server, this vehicle manufacturer captured many benefits previously out of their grasp. They can now enjoy the flexibility of Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) while easily scaling to meet growing demands.

Their new Control Tower application tracks a vehicle’s Route Plan, following the vehicle from factory completion to arrival at the dealership. Arrival times, mode of transport, route-segment bottlenecks, and delay reasons are recorded as an immutable sequence of events, following each vehicle across every carrier and handoff from factory floor to dealership lot. Because every movement is captured as it happens, the position and history of any unit can be reconstructed at any point in time, and the record spans the handoffs where visibility used to break. The audit trail is the system of record, not a log bolted on beside it.

The approach & relationship our company invested with Axoniq, in Control Tower,will be easily used in more areas at [GAM] around the world”

- Lead Anchor Software Engineer & Solutions Architect

Challenges

Our client needed to build a state-of-the-art Global Track and Trace logistics application that would monitor vehicles movement from factories to dealerships. The new application needed to meet a critical need for estimated times of product arrival to customers. These ETAs are imperative for multiple Lines of Business to ensure payments are released at the correct time.

Wanting to design the application based on an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) rather than build and maintain an in-house framework, this group sought out an open source purpose-built solution.

Design Criteria

• Flexible and Scalable

• Enterprise Security

• High Availability

• Fully Auditable

• Cloud Ready

Solutions

The application runs across two separate bare-metal data centers in a five-node cluster, meeting the availability and security bar the business set. As the manufacturer extends the same pattern to other parts of their supply chain, the Axoniq foundation is designed to move into their own Virtual Private Cloud on Google Cloud Platform.

The manufacturer now has provable, end-to-end visibility across their outbound chain: the flexibility of event-driven architecture, straightforward scaling as volumes grow, and a complete auditable record of every unit's route across every party that touches it. ETAs the business can trust means payments release on time, across every line of business that depends on them, and the same track-and-trace pattern extends to the rest of their supply chain.