Heinrich Schmid, a large-scale German enterprise group in the construction sector, required an in-house web application to enhance employee efficiency in conducting business operations. For the past 4 years, we have been supporting the century-old industry leader by developing the backend development of this web app.
Microservices
Micro-frontends
GraphQL
Web development
Software architecture
Platform engineering
Heinrich Schmid is a German enterprise group, offering a wide range of construction services across Europe. With its extensive network of hundreds of branches and thousands of employees, the 100-year-old industry leader generates terabytes of data and handles thousands of mission-critical transactions every day.
We have been collaborating with Heinrich Schmid for the last 4 years. Although we are currently involved in a long-term partnership with the enterprise group, we started our journey together with our 100-day MVP model to quickly validate how well Heinrich Schmid employees would adapt to digital transformation. Starting from day one, our collaboration has been grounded in open communication and a transparent development process, with our work readily accessible on platforms such as GitHub and Jira whenever needed.
After years of doing business in the traditional way, Heinrich Schmid realized that managing thousands of transactions on paper was no longer practical or efficient. In search of a more modern solution, Heinrich Schmid decided to digitize its internal processes to meet operational needs and provide additional support to their existing SAP system when needed.
To meet this challenge, Heinrich Schmid approached us to develop an internal app from scratch to simplify and streamline its business operations. The app would allow employees to say goodbye to the struggles of working with paper and provide a single platform for conducting business with clients online. All files and information would be easily accessible with just a few clicks, bringing convenience and efficiency to the workplace.
Heinrich Schmid has various departments with different use cases. But for the MVP scope, we focused on the offer module they used to manage the bidding process of their projects. We then named our project, Baumappe.
After 100 days, we launched the first version of the application. Following the release, Systemhaus, the Shared Service Center of the enterprise group, collected feedback from every branch using our product to evaluate its performance. The initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive, indicating that Heinrich Schmid employees found the app easy to use and integrated it seamlessly into their daily work processes.
With the validation of our product, we took the next step and continued the project through our long-term partnership model. Upon transitioning into a long-term partnership, our initially monolithic application expanded to support the requirements of various departments, including HR, Sales, and Finance. As our app evolved, we embraced a distributed architecture, utilizing microservices and micro-frontends to align with its growing needs.
We built two dedicated and self-oriented Scrum teams following Scaled Scrum principles. These teams consist of Backend Developers, Frontend Developers, QAs, DevOps, Test Automation Engineers, and Scrum Masters.
Web Development, Software Architecture, Quality Assurance, Data Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps.
Azure Portal, Azure DevOps, Kubernetes, Terraform, Microservices, Micro Frontends, Feature-Toggling, Kustomize, Argo CD, New Relic, Grafana, OpenFaaS, Node.js, TypeScript, GraphQL, React, Apollo GraphQL, Apollo Federation, gRPC, Azure Service Bus.
We have provided Heinrich Schmid with a customized super app that effectively functions as an extra power boost to their SAP system for ultimate efficiency. Today, around 3,000 employees across hundreds of branches carry out their processes digitally through our app. This digital transformation has enabled the enterprise group to manage a substantial portion of its operations through digital means. Currently, we are still operating as two Scrum teams, consisting of 15 people in total, focused on ongoing development to constantly improve our app with new features.
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