Alliance Automotive

Challenge

Alliance Automotive Group is a large supplier of aftermarket vehicle parts. Through a series of acquisitions, the company now has over 200 locations, 20 regional distribution centers and 5 national distribution centers across Europe and North America.

As AAG has scaled up, the supplier is now processing and fulfilling thousands of orders daily. This makes order processing a key imperative—AAG must ensure orders are processed as smoothly and as efficiently as possible.

However, as AAG acquired other businesses, merging all the different workflows surrounding the order fulfillment process became a major pain point. The company spent a lot of resources creating custom integrations for various business workflows. These workflows lacked any sort of centralized governance and didn’t meet the GDPR requirements of the business.

“We found it difficult to audit workflows and files were being lost,” said Chris Tranter, Technical Services Manager, AAG. “We were constantly chasing our tails and unable to support the business sufficiently.”

Solution

Looking for a way to better manage these workflows, Alliance Automotive turned to Advanced Cyber Solutions, a provider of IT consultancy services and a Titanium Progress Partner. Together, they evaluated a slate of different solutions (including ones already used within the company) but ultimately went with Progress® MOVEit® Automation

MOVEit Automation provided the flexibility and reliability AAG needed to operate effectively while still offering the oversight and security required to comply regulations. MOVEit also met four specific project requirements:

• A flexible scripting language, supporting full PowerShell scripting
• Good community support and peer reviews
• Flexible deployment models (on-premises and dedicated editions for cloud hosts)
• An affordable price tag that fit within budget

“MOVEit had the best selection of inbuilt/extensible scripting components and a decent community backing, which was the single most important thing for us,” Tranter said.

Results

After selecting MOVEit Automation as the winning solution, it took just one day for Alliance Automotive to install the software and get to work creating automated workflows.

Advanced Cyber Solutions played a critical role in speeding up this process, offering assistance with setting up workflows and connecting to Office 360 for an email attachment collection.

“Advanced Cyber Solutions has been able to assist in all these scenarios to a high capacity,” Tranter added.

So far, AAG has leaned on MOVEit to create basic collection and delivery workflows. For example, the first thing AAG did was replace custom scripts to pick up B2B files from multiple locations, sorting them and delivering them into the correct destinations. This enabled the company to:

• Speed up mission-critical processes to keep up with the pace of business
• Eliminate mistakes from processes that were previously human led
• Save resources by eliminating custom integration scripts and code

“MOVEit Automation has helped us to save time and resources by no longer writing custom integration scripts and code,” Tranter added.

About Alliance Automotive Group

AAG plays a key part in the logistics chain that supplies parts for cars and commercial vehicles in its markets across Europe. With a focus on both organic and external growth, AAG has extended its footprint to cover over half of the European independent aftermarket.

About Advanced Cyber Solution

Founded on experience and knowledge, Advanced Cyber Solutions is a new breed of IT security solutions provider that actually understands the needs of the CISO and IT administrator. Find out how we can help you secure your organization with training, services or solutions.