Mobility data provider Intelematics has recently shifted the manual-based customer onboarding process to an automated one. The entire process is being implemented to turn around the internal processes and customer service.
The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria (RACV) owned company, Intelematics, worked with Mulesoft to introduce Anypoint Platform to the technology stack. The step was taken after realizing that it is not enough to rely on any manual system to onboard customers regarding the level of the traffic intelligence capability.
“Our products are very contemporary, very modular, and API-driven solutions built from the ground up using the latest technology,” Intelematics CEO Nick Marks told ZDNet.
“With our traffic intelligence capability specifically, the onboarding process for new customers was quite a manual and laborious task that involved such things as registration and granting portal access, so we decided that it was a great opportunity to automate and streamline that process.”
Marks said the process that previously took up to half a day had been reduced to 15 minutes.
“It’s a much better experience not only for internal staff in operations but our customers. They’re firing off with confirmation emails because that process is now all very streamlined,” he added.
However, this switch is only one among several projects in progress at Intelematics’ more comprehensive digital transformation program, which has been going on for at least the last five years.
The company has also been slowly building out the microservices architecture for reducing silos that previously existed between four of its four main products: connected vehicle and fleet management platform, safety and security platform, traffic intelligence analytics platform, and mobility service platform.
“Fundamentally, they have a whole bunch of common data and foundation and use GIS [geographic information system] or mapping in one form or another. Of course, there’s reporting, SLA [service level agreement] tracking, authorisation access control, so really to bring all that together and create a common platform right across all of our product sets, we could only do that through APIs and microservices. For us, Mulesoft is critical to really enable us to do that,” Marks said.
“There’s a lot of efficiency to be gained from that. That’s why we adopted a robust microservices architecture to be able to interlink the common elements together and choreograph them in such a way they deliver the functionality, without rebuilding and refactoring the unique architecture for each product line.”
Marks also said that the change was realized when they introspected how much ‘technical debt’ Intelematics had accrued from building the products right in the first place.
“Along the course of that journey, you build technical debt at the expense of speed of build. As our product matured and started to get that product market fit, we’ve determined that now it’s time to step back a little bit and pay down the principle on that technical debt,” he explained.
According to Marks, Intelematics has formed a central data team to support the company in deriving data from its track intelligence platform. The team takes the responsibility to ensure no downtime between a customer requesting information and getting it.
He lastly added, “In the past, the teams were organised, self-sufficient and multidisciplinary. We then decided to create a central data function that canvasses all the needs right across the product lines from data engineering, data architecture, and visualisation. That was a really important step to take really help facilitate and speed up the process.”
