PSA Group

A tailor-made solution to “broken telephone” in the automotive industry

Gray vehicle being fixed inside factory using robot machines.

The context

Our client PSA Group is a French multinational automobile and motorcycle manufacturer (the second largest in Europe), responsible for the Citroën, DS Automobiles, Peugeot, Opel, and Vauxhall brands. They came to us wanting to streamline communications between their manufacturing facilities and sales managers at their dealerships via a new application.

Their existing application was only linked to the Citroën brand, and wasn’t scalable enough for their needs. We were tasked with developing a new app from scratch: one that would be compatible with the older versions of Windows that PSA was using at many of their car dealerships. Here’s how we did it.

Project details

Industry

Manufacturing

Technologies

React Native

Node.js

Docker

MySQL

Services

Development

The challenge

Before PSA Group partnered with Osedea to create their new app, sales directors didn’t have a simple, streamlined way to communicate with their teams. To help PSA find a better way to communicate objectives and sales results to managers across the entire group of brands, we started to explore their unique business needs via a solid Discovery phase.

Photo of a woman and a man looking at a tablet screen.

The task at hand

Over a period of three months, we created an application that met all of PSA Group’s desired functionalities - including real-time notifications, compatibility with Windows 7, and a unique look and feel for each brand. The resulting app means data is centralized and accessible to managers of each branch on their desktop in real-time (e.g. data on point-of-sale results, reports on objectives, and bonuses). Uploading data is now a one-click operation.

The end result

This project presented a host of learning opportunities and technical challenges that we were keen to tackle.

Firstly, we used React Native, a cutting-edge technology for building native apps. While we’re pros at using this technology for mobile applications, we hadn’t used it to build a Windows application before. We welcomed the opportunity to try React Native on a new platform - and on an old version of Windows (Windows 7), as well. It was a great learning experience for us.

These hurdles presented a chance to walk our talk re: our core value of “simply put, we care”. Despite our inability to directly access the custom proxy server, we were committed to delivering an outstanding product. So when we found out we wouldn’t be able to do all the testing ourselves (the way we normally would), we developed a custom workflow for the testing that included the PSA team. Because for us, doing whatever it takes just comes naturally.