The new Porsche Bank shop for nearly new cars has been online since mid-November. It is truly revolutionary because it allows the entire purchasing process, from choosing a car to concluding a contract, to be dealt with online. For Porsche Informatik, the digital application path in the Porsche Bank shop is a showcase project for our modularisation strategy.
In its Online Shop, Porsche Bank offers its employees’ used company cars in an attractive online package: nearly new cars including residual value leasing, comprehensive and motor vehicle liability insurance. The particularly favourable conditions for these used cars aim to make online financing an attractive proposition. The goal of the development project was to map all the process steps along the application path online and to integrate them into the existing Porsche Holding modules.
The overall process is really quite complex, as is made clear by the customer journey in the diagram below. Once a customer has decided on a vehicle, they register in the customer portal, enter their personal information, initiate a credit check, issue a direct debit mandate for financing and upload documents, such as payslips. To ensure that the contracts are legally binding, an external video identification and signature procedure is integrated into the process. All of this is submitted to the Porsche Bank business application department and the customer then receives confirmation of the conclusion via e-mail. Physical contact only takes place when the customer actually picks the car up from the dealership.
Modularisation as a basis
At Porsche Informatik, we have been working on the modularisation of our systems for several years now. This means that we extract modules from existing products step by step, give them additional functionality and generalise them for future use cases. As a result, the individual modules we used in the Porsche Bank shop were already at our disposal. In the digital application path for the new online shop, we brought everything together to cover the online sales process from top to bottom.
The “customer journey” in the Porsche Bank online shop and the existing modules that were used for this.
Despite the existing components, the project remained a challenge. More than 8,000 hours were spent in four sub-projects, and while the work in the sub-projects and the module extensions went relatively smoothly, the final phase, which was about bringing all the modules together, was challenging and intense with difficulties arising at times with regard to the technical interaction of all the modules. Some requirements that had to be implemented across modules proved to be quite troublesome. Ultimately, however, the project was implemented successfully and on time – above all because all the divisions involved in the project all came together and showed great team spirit.
Outlook
The fully digital application path now makes a wide range of use cases possible. Our plan is to initially connect further exchange platforms for the used car sector and then to move on to the new car sector. At a later stage, we will roll out these solutions on an international basis.
This project was a real milestone not only for Porsche Bank, but also for us as Porsche Informatik as the current pandemic situation is making it more important than ever to implement such flagship projects in online sales.
Click here to visit the Porsche Bank shop: https://www.porschebank.at/shop
