Kalla Toyota is one of Toyota Main dealer in Sulawesi area with more than 30 branches across the island. Founded by Hadji Kalla in 1952, Kalla Toyota is the largest dealer of Toyota vehicle brand in the area with more than 15,000 to 20,000 units sold per year.
Legacy Systems
With that kind of figure, it is nearly impossible for the company to record the sales and all related business activity without a computerized system. Back in 2014, indeed there are some legacy systems to record all the transactions into the database. But the problem is, all the systems are not connected in the way modern line of business applications do. Users will have to collect data from one system to another and summarize them into some financial statement reports to see whether everything are running fine.
The core activity of the business comprises of the following:
And there will be some supporting activities:
It will be a cumbersome task even with the help of data connector to monitor the business at real time or near real time since data were scattered all over the places. It is a huge task yet a challenging one to bring all the legacy system into one modern connected application. We have mountain to climb obviously, but we can see things better from the top of the mountain.
Solutions For Better Future
There was an issue to be dealt with before transforming legacy system to a new integrated system, at least 70% of the branch offices has slow and unstable network connection to connect to the main server. So, there has to be a way for users to store the transactions in a local server and then replicate the changes asynchronously to the main server.
Microsoft SQL Server has a good tool to replicate data in two way using Merge Replication, and this is the topology implemented in Kalla Toyota to solve the issue above.
As seen the above diagram, all sub-systems are connected to each other to provide a better information for the company. Employees have their own username and can login to the system based on their role. There is no way a Part Salesman can access vehicle service history, nor a technician can see accounting journals. All transactions related to financial will be recorded as in accounting system automagically. That will allow financial manager to see the financial reports on daily basis if needed. Part stock will flow from part center to after sales branch’s warehouse along the physical part itself as the system also provide real-time part checking when parts has been sent out or received in respective warehouse.
Technologies and tools
Programming Language : C#
Database : Microsoft SQL Server 2014
Others : Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, Microsoft Project
Here are links to sample user documentations and video tutorials:
