Empowering Inter Cars' Inventory with Cloud Services

Challenge

Inter Cars, Eastern Europe's largest importer and distributor of automotive spare parts, faced a significant challenge in managing their vast inventory. As the business expanded, their legacy inventory management system struggled to track and coordinate spare parts across multiple locations efficiently.

The outdated system was slow, prone to errors, and lacked the ability to provide real-time updates and analytics. This led to problems in predicting demand, managing stocks, and optimizing distribution.

Solution

Link Group was approached to build a robust, cloud-native service platform to revolutionize Inter Cars' inventory management. Utilizing Elasticsearch stack for application development, our team constructed a modern, scalable, and real-time inventory management system.

Docker and Kubernetes were instrumental in enabling application scaling, while PostgreSQL was used to manage structured data, and Elasticsearch was used to handle unstructured data for better analytics.

Terraform and Ansible were utilized for efficient infrastructure management. Helm was used for pre-configured Kubernetes resources, making the deployment process smoother.

GitLab was used for version control, while Hashicorp Vault and Consul helped in managing the application secrets and service discovery respectively. The monitoring and logging stack was enhanced with Prometheus and Grafana, providing real-time insight into the system.

Results

The implementation of the new cloud-native platform led to significant improvements:

• Inventory discrepancies reduced by 35%, ensuring more reliable stock management.
• Improved real-time tracking and analytics resulted in a 45% increase in the accuracy of demand forecasting.
• Enhanced operational efficiency led to a 30% boost in productivity, optimizing distribution processes.

This solution positioned Inter Cars to better handle their inventory management challenges, and simultaneously, it laid a robust foundation for their future growth in the competitive automotive spare parts industry.