Modernizing Dealer Operations with Wipro’s Next-Gen Dealer Management System on AWS

By Pradeepsinh Rathod, Domain Expert – Wipro
By Rinki Kumari, Enterprise Architect – Wipro
By Niladri Sekhar Adhikari, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Tushar Agarwal, Manager, Partner Solutions Architecture – AWS

Wipro

A dealer/distributor management system (DMS) serves as a fundamental system for channel partners such as dealers, distributors, and retailers across various industries.

It caters to a wide range of requirements such as lead/enquiry management (pre-sales), primary sales (ordering/purchasing), secondary sales (sales/retail), inventory management, after-sales/service, warranty management, CRM/feedback, partner management, financial accounting, and HR.

Over the last two decades, Wipro has implemented complex DMS systems for more than 15 customers across automotive, telecom, and retail industries. Some of the key customer asks include:

Network expansion: Support for not just core stakeholders like dealers and distributors, but also for extended network of retailers, influencers, and vendors. Traditional DMS systems tend to fail here.
New-age capabilities: Such as native mobile apps, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and cloud readiness.
Integrated system: A platform app connecting stakeholders like original equipment managers (OEMs), vendors, channel partners, influencers, and consumers to provide an integrated experience; unlike traditional siloed or partially connected DMS systems.
Accessibility: Customers demand doorstep services, be it sales or after-sales. Hence, the need for robust field force systems enabling critical decisions while on the move.
Connected vehicles: Features providing near real-time vehicle data such as actual mileage, kilometers traveled, vehicle performance, and existing and upcoming issues/failures.
Remote repair: Assist customers at doorstep or at failure point of the product. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) enable remote technical assistance.
Adaptability to policies/regulations/compliances: Ability to define, enforce, and manage geo-specific policies and industry regulations pertaining to data of all stakeholders.
Advanced decision making: Dynamic data-driven insights and actions are important for modern DMS stakeholders. Leveraging internal systems data as well as external sources like social media platforms helps users with real-time actionable insights.

Wipro’s next-generation DMS supports most of these advanced features. In this post, we delve into the platform’s effective deployment and how to leverage the DMS on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Wipro is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner that harnesses the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, and emerging technologies to help clients adapt to the digital world. Wipro is a member of the AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) and Well-Architected Partner Programs.

Wipro’s Next-Gen DMS

Following are key tenets of Wipro’s next-gen dealer/distributor management system:

Figure 1 – Tenets of Wipro’s next-gen DMS.

The DMS platform is engineered as a truly digital, fully connected solution enabling dealers to manage their entire business from a single window. Depicted below is the platform’s functional architecture.

Figure 2 – Functional architecture of Wipro’s next-gen DMS.

Solution Overview

Wipro’s next-gen DMS offers a user-friendly, omnichannel solution with personalized dashboards that seamlessly integrates with various platforms through APIs, message queues, and data pipelines. It has been designed using industry best practices and is aligned to the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Figure 3 – Technical architecture of Wipro’s next-gen DMS.

The following guiding principles drive the platform’s design:

Design with business perspective: Flexibility and business adaptability are achieved via configuration and feature flags, for current and future business as well as operational needs.
Decoupled architecture with clear responsibility segregation: Engineered on a modular microservices architecture so functions such as sales, service, inventory, returns, and accounting can be configured, managed, and scaled independently.
Scalability: Leverages cloud-native services and autoscaling features based on pre-defined metrics and thresholds. Wipro’s next-gen DMS can intelligently adjust resource allocation in response to varying workloads, with minimal operator intervention.
Reliability: Designed to achieve high availability and reliability across every layer, including application, database, storage, and network infrastructure.
Performance: Balance between high performance and cost optimization ensures smooth and cost-effective handling of high traffic and year-on-year growth. Observability for monitoring service-level agreements (SLAs), enabling alerts and handling demand spikes.
Security: A defense-in-depth security strategy ensures comprehensive security for both the infrastructure and data. Several layers of security measures create a robust security posture.
Define everything (possible) by code: Automation is pervasive at all stages, including DevOps and infrastructure as code (IaC) provisioning.
Anytime, anywhere access: Secure omnichannel access via multiple devices and form factors, especially offline access enabled from mobile devices.
Effective reporting and analytics: Multiple out-of-the-box reports and dashboards track data across sales, service, and accounts. Reporting environment segregation supports role-based access with negligible impact on operational environment.

Customer Benefits

Wipro’s next-gen DMS built on AWS provides several customer advantages:

Modern and comprehensive one-stop-shop solution for all dealer operations.
User-friendly and omnichannel experience resulting in dealer satisfaction.
End-to-end visibility of key performance indicators (KPIs) and data across functions for all channel partners.
Improved agility and go-to-market (GTM) time through automation and DevOps.
Maximal utilization of open source and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) components, reducing licensing overheads.
Highly available architecture with disaster recovery and automated backup and recovery procedures.
Improved security through single sign-on (SSO), role-based access, and data and network security.
Reduced maintenance and operational overhead with AWS managed services.
Predictive analytics like predicting vehicle failure and AI-powered inventory management via cloud-native capabilities.
AI-based chatbots to resolve user queries.
Compliance with regulatory guidelines, GDPR, and taxation.

Technology Landscape

The diagram below shows the deployment architecture of Wipro’s next-gen DMS on AWS.

Figure 4 – Deployment architecture on AWS.

Wipro’s next-gen DMS leverages the following AWS services to realize a Well-Architected, scalable, secure, reliable, and cost-effective customer implementation.

Compute Services

The solution leverages a modern microservices-based architecture, where containerized Java Spring Boot-based microservices are hosted on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with AWS Fargate, a serverless container compute engine. By harnessing the power of Amazon EKS and AWS Fargate, Wipro’s next-gen DMS gains advantages in scalability, flexibility, and automation. This combination leads to enhanced performance and cost optimization.

Amazon API Gateway serves as the entry point for the microservices, overseeing tasks such as authentication, authorization, and rate limiting. It facilitates integrations with other systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), and serves as a gateway for web and mobile channels to access DMS functionalities.

Data Services

Wipro’s next-gen DMS utilizes purpose-built, highly available, multi-Availability Zone (AZ) database services like Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL (a fully PostgreSQL compatible managed database), Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Redshift to accommodate various use cases. It relies on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and its various storage tiers to support diverse use cases such as data migration, storing customer uploads, retaining generated reports, and exchanging data with external systems.

Furthermore, the solution incorporates Amazon ElastiCache for Redis to establish a high-performance and resilient caching layer.

Observability, Monitoring, and Alerts

The solution uses tools such as Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry to continuously observe the application’s health, performance, and availability. CloudWatch alerts are triggered on deviations from pre-defined thresholds, enabling proactive responses to potential issues and facilitating timely intervention. Additionally, Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) and Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) are used for emails and notifications.

Security

The key components employed for constructing these security controls are:

Identity and access management: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), Amazon Cognito
Infrastructure security: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), AWS WAF, Amazon GuardDuty
Data encryption: At-rest using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), in-transit using TLS certificate stored in AWS Certificate Manager.

Networking

The network layer is constructed utilizing Amazon VPC, AWS Direct Connect (dedicated connectivity to other on-premises corporate applications), Amazon Route 53 (DNS), AWS Transit Gateway, AWS NAT Gateway (outbound internet traffic), Elastic Load Balancing (Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing), Amazon CloudFront for low latency content delivery (CDN), and AWS Site-to-Site VPN.

Automation and DevOps

AWS-native services like AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodePipeline, in conjunction with open-source software like ArgoCD, SonarQube, Selenium, and others, are employed to construct the DevSecOps pipeline.

Data Migration

Data migration is a crucial process for successful cloud deployments, requiring consideration of factors like data types, volume, and available network resources. The data migration architecture is presented, leveraging AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and AWS Glue (for ETL).

Figure 7 – Data migration architecture.

Conclusion

While considering business-critical solutions like a dealer/distributor management system (DMS), it’s crucial for customers and solution providers to fully embrace the potential of the cloud, moving beyond mere workload migration from on-premises environments.

Wipro’s next-gen DMS leverages the deep and broad capabilities of AWS services to provide customers a modern market-leading solution.

By deploying Wipro’s next-gen DMS on AWS, organizations gain access to a range of innovative capabilities that converge in areas such as data-powered insights, global availability, and the growing digitization of business functions. These advancements enable dealers to gain valuable insights from their DMS system and quickly address stakeholder expectations.

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Wipro – AWS Partner Spotlight

Wipro is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that harnesses the power of cognitive computing, hyper-automation, robotics, cloud, analytics, and emerging technologies to help clients adapt to the digital world.

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