Challenge
Due to a lack of commercial off-the-shelf software products that meet the needs of the equipment rental industry, Coates Hire relies on lots of bespoke systems, such as CRM app built with Microsoft Dynamics, and ERP system built with Baseplan) and a custom master data store, all of which need to be connected to the rest of their business and customer engagement channels.
With a project called Project Mercury, Coates Hire is replacing batch processing with event-driven architecture, focusing on customer and order domains/events. The goal of Project Mercury is to improve customer experience by integrating their legacy systems in real-time with 150 retail locations, a web portal called MyCoatesHire, an e-commerce web app called HireNow, and new mobile apps.
In addition, Coates Hire is planning to invest heavily into IoT technology to help better track and manage both its rental and logistical equipment, and knew their existing architecture would not be able to manage this new demand.
Solution
Their existing integration approach and architecture would not be able to meet these requirements. They perform a lot of database table updates and row inserts as single inserts, which are quite slow. While they looked at Dell Boomi and Mulesoft for API management, ultimately Coates Hire decided on custom-built adapters to connect to PubSub+ Event Broker services.
They will now use PubSub+ to handle updates via queuing with in-order delivery and transactional semantics, which will give them the ability to fan messages out to diverse back end systems and customers via several engagement channels.
Benefits
In general, Coates Hire expects to reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to integrate new applications with legacy systems. One of the biggest benefits of doing so will be improving customer satisfaction and retention by giving customers easier access to more real-time information through all channels.
They also improved business continuity by removing the risk associated with home-grown messaging infrastructure. Finally, implementing IoT across their enterprise will let them more effectively “track and trace” rental and logistical equipment, and improve the efficiency of logistics services they offer with their fleet of 2,000+ delivery vehicles.
Coates Hire rents out over 1 million pieces of equipment throughout Southeast Asia, including construction, earth moving and traffic management equipment, as well as trucks, vehicles, and trailers.