The worldwide automotive aftermarket in the cloud: Global data services provider TecAlliance intensifies customer collaboration with Dynamics 365

The challenge: Harmonized processes for better on-site customer service

The list of TecAlliance partners reads like a who’s who of the automotive supplier industry, with no fewer than 35 leading automotive companies including Bosch, Continental, Schaeffler, ZF, MAHLE, and BILSTEIN. Their data flows into TecAlliance platforms, enabling customers to identify a vehicle by its make, model, year of manufacture, chassis type—or, if available, its VIN and equipment variant—and then use this digital twin to locate all its component parts and access additional information about how they have been maintained, installed, or replaced.

“We deal in vehicle data. We collect and process it to make it usable,” says Marcel Aurnhammer, Lead Global Business Applications & Processes at TecAlliance. The company provides the data platforms that enable an auto shop to order from a spare parts dealer, which orders from a wholesaler, which in turn orders from the manufacturer. Fleet operators also use TecAlliance data services when calculating how much it will cost to maintain and repair their fleets. 

This means that the company is active in various markets the world over, with locations everywhere from “Australia to China to North and South America,” Aurnhammer says. “TecAlliance grew out of different companies and we continue to grow.” But what also emerged was a diverse landscape of different systems for purchasing, accounting, and controlling—and technical interfaces weren’t always in place to connect them. In several cases, data had to be processed manually, which is time-consuming and more prone to error. 

“But customers want us to be fast in providing our quote, our services, and then our bill,” Aurnhammer says, describing one aspect TecAlliance has improved through the system migration. Harmonization also paves to way for stable growth: “Our main goal was to be able to channel our time and money into building excellent solutions for our customers instead of into keeping up with our own admin. That way, we can generate more customer revenue with the same number of administrative employees.”

The solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 for ERP, CRM, and HR from a single source

In a preliminary project, the TecAlliance project and leadership teams worked with a management consultancy to set the requirements for the system migration. In a comparison of potential solutions, Microsoft products clearly had the edge over the competition. Since TecAlliance had already implemented Microsoft Dynamics for Sales as a CRM solution, it made sense to migrate the ERP system and HR software accordingly—to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain, and to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Human Resources. Arineo, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, was chosen to ensure the migration went smoothly.

The requirements were: swift adaptability to new markets, rapid response to customer inquiries, standardized offer and order preparation, a high degree of failure safety, and the incorporation of global data market requirements of as many countries as possible. “It also had to be a system that could be accessed from anywhere via a web browser, that was compatible with the Microsoft solutions used in the back office and with the existing Dynamics CRM, and that combined everything from financial and project management to purchasing and sales in a single application,” says Leandro Meermeier, Sales Director at Arineo. “At the moment, no other provider in the market can keep up with Microsoft.”

Aurnhammer adds: “We had less than 200 hundred hours’ development time to get our minimum viable product ready to go live.” One of the project’s key goals was to stay as close as possible to the standard product; the results confirmed that the Dynamics solution met TecAlliance’s needs from the outset. The five-month preliminary project began in February 2020, just before the start of the COVID-19 health crisis in March. The initial discussions with Arineo took place in July and the project itself was launched in September. And in January 2021, the new ERP system was rolled out for two of TecAlliance’s locations with 400 users in Germany. “The system required so little modification that a year after going live we still logged less than 500 hours of development time,” Aurnhammer says. What was also special about this project was that the migration was pulled off under difficult working conditions due to the coronavirus pandemic: with a maximum of ten in-person meetings possible, the remaining steps were coordinated on Microsoft Teams and Azure DevOps.

“When you’re working on an ERP project, it’s important to keep asking whether it’s more efficient to adjust the corporate process or the system,” Aurnhammer says. For instance, TecAlliance defined its procurement process including approvals so that it dovetailed with the system standard. When it came to fixed-term contracts, however, it was the system that had to be adjusted as it couldn’t incorporate automatic renewals. “Ultimately, this was the issue behind 70 percent of our inquiries for development services,” Aurnhammer says. “At the same time, this has made our process more transparent and secure than the order lists that our colleagues used to keep.”

TecAlliance GmbH in Germany, oneIDentity+ GmbH, Caruso GmbH, TecAlliance Netherlands B.V., and two locations in Spain are all now using the new ERP system, which is being rolled out globally in stages. Currently, TecAlliance and Arineo are also implementing Dynamics 365 Commerce.  “We’ve already received praise from customers because our processes have become noticeably faster,” Aurnhammer says. This goes to show that a harmonized system with globally uniform standards speeds up data transmission and transparency. Sometimes it can actually be good when employees aren’t yet fully up to speed with a new system: “The occasional glitch is to be expected when you launch a new system, but we soon discovered the major benefit that these problems got noticed faster,” Aurnhammer says, adding with a wink: “And it’s us who noticed them before the customers did.”

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