Introduction
Digital Sales Workplace (DSW) is a solution that serves as a tool or a workplace for the salespersons to manage their sales activities for example managing leads, preparing offers, and scheduling appointments with prospective customer. The aim is to turn more inquiries into confirmed orders. DSW is a holistic automotive retail solution designed to help automotive businesses easily embrace a digital strategy covering the entire sales processes. Its key benefits are to maximize sales team efficiency, boost customer satisfaction and workflow driven utilizing cutting-edge technology.
Business Context
In the scope of VSS, DSW serves as front-end tool of the vehicle sales process. It is mainly used by the salesperson to manage sales activities and interaction with prospective customers. With DSW, the salesperson can work on a single platform or user interface (UI) without the need to access multiple backend system or to contact different department to get information or status updates. This resolves the issues that the salesperson is commonly facing for example problem with measuring efficiency or an inconsistent customer facing approach. DSW provides the salesperson with a standardized and unified approach to manage sales activities and on the other hand reduces the administration effort of the salesperson in trying to close the deal with the customers.
In DSW, the salesperson can choose to create a lead via a configurator or directly from a list of published vehicles. An initial offer can be prepared for the customer with typical automotive pricing structure which includes the functionality to add discount by percentage or absolute amount, add upselling items or upselling packages, capture financing or leasing information, capture down payment information and assign sales campaign. Pricing simulation function offers the ability to verify the latest pricing condition and ensures the price displayed in the offer is according to the price maintained in VSS. Saving the sales offer in DSW triggers the creation of sales quotation in VSS.
Once the customer is satisfied with the offer, the salesperson can convert the sales offer to a sales order in DSW where eventually, the creation sales order will be triggered in VSS. The subsequent process or sequence of event on the sales order for example vehicle assignment, goods movement, order split, and invoicing are then traditionally handled in VSS. Status update of the vehicle and the sales order occurs on real-time basis between VSS and DSW.
Solution Overview
Integration Component Overview
The above diagram describes the component overview of the VSS-DSW integration. This component delivers different type of interfaces (inbound, outbound, or bi-directional) for different integration objects (for example business partners, vehicle, and sales order).
DSW application can be integrated with other application or solution via the One Dealer Integration Layer or commonly known as ODIL Neuro. ODIL deliver standardized API that offers inbound and outbound integration with DSW. It is a set of services implemented in MS Azure focusing on security, configuration, and data transfer. It supports not only exchanging business transaction for various means, but also the user access authentication, user/data mapping, and single sign-on options are embedded in the framework. The API are constructed for different direction depending on the integration objects.
Depending on the system architecture of the project implementation, ODIL can communicate with VSS via the SAP Cloud integration. However, in any case, a direct connection to VSS is also possible.
The following explains on a high level, the component within VSS:
VSS has the REST Client as a component to generating the connection to DSW.
Distribution controller defines when a particular integration object needs to be processed (immediate, time interval, etc).
Data access controller performs the relevant activities on the integration objects depending on the request coming from the interface for example read, write, update, etc.
REST Server responds to the initiated call from DSW.
Integration point
The following describes the integration point in scope VSS-DSW integration:
