Adding hundreds of new locations in just a few years can make data integration a challenge. With over 452 branches (currently) across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg, Van Mossel Group is the largest automotive company in the Benelux, and is continuing to expand rapidly.
The CloverDX Data Integration Platform sits at the heart of their data integration processes, helping manage all the data exchanges the business needs to function.
A scalable, transparent data integration platform
Because of all the brand dealerships and their corresponding requirements for different supporting systems, Van Mossel faces a challenging multi-application landscape consisting of 100+ applications.
CloverDX makes it possible to integrate data across all of those different applications and sources – in total there’s over 13,000 data tasks executed every week.
Having CloverDX as the integration layer between applications gives Van Mossel a scalable, transparent way of building, executing and monitoring all the company’s data processes centrally.
"One-to-one integrations between applications aren’t feasible for us. It’s not monitored, and if something happens it’s not controlled by the IT team. So one of my goals is to make sure that CloverDX is in the middle of all those integrations."
Koenraad Bruins, the recently-appointed Chief Information Officer of the Van Mossel Group says: “One-to-one integrations between applications aren’t feasible for us. It’s not monitored, and if something happens it’s not controlled by the IT team. So one of my goals is to make sure that CloverDX is in the middle of all those integrations.”
Nachalle Kortrink, Manager, BI and Information Provision, is responsible for the applications at Van Mossel, and with her team manages data integration, data warehousing and reporting for the Group, and she adds that CloverDX is an important part of delivering accurate data:
“The stability of CloverDX is key to the business – if we don’t have that we don’t have reliable data and we lose the grip on what’s happening with the business.”
“The stability of CloverDX is key to the business"
Chris van Doorn, Business & Data Analyst at Van Mossel, gives an example of just one of the processes CloverDX enables: “We have to align on a single view of what each location and each car is. Which sounds simple, but when you consider that we have over 400 locations, and each dealer enters information into their own systems in a different way, it can be very inconsistent and error-prone. CloverDX allows us to standardize, centralize and validate all the information coming from multiple sources.”
And managing that scale isn’t just an abstract data problem – there’s very real-world implications for what that data represents. As just one example, Chris explains:
“We have 3,500 parking spaces at our HQ, and they’re almost all occupied most of the time. To be able to facilitate the sale of and logistics around those cars, we have to be able to combine information to make sure all the car data is completely accurate at that moment when the information is retrieved.”
Bringing new acquisitions into the Van Mossel data infrastructure
Van Mossel have added hundreds of new international locations in the last years, and more are in the pipeline. CloverDX is playing a huge part in helping onboard these newly-acquired companies. Each new acquisition can have its own financial system, dealer management system, HR tools, and more – all of which need to be integrated quickly into Van Mossel’s systems.
CIO Koenraad Bruins explains how some of their earlier acquisitions in the Netherlands and Belgium were easier to manage, as they used to “get a van, fill it with IT equipment, go to the new dealership and rebuild everything to the Van Mossel IT system.”
But now that the acquisitions are larger, more frequent, and across international borders, the company needed to streamline the process of integrating applications to the existing infrastructure so the IT and BI teams can keep up with business growth.
Chris van Doorn describes the data onboarding process in an ideal world as “We would have a timescale of 9-12 months, and we’d already know 80% of the applications, so we don’t need to make new data connections or data models.”
But he says that reality is often somewhat different: “We don’t do just one acquisition, but we could be doing a couple at the same time, and they all get announced within a short timespan, and they all need to be done as soon as possible – and you just have to go and do it and make it work.”
The repeatablility of data flows built in CloverDX makes onboarding new locations easier and more transparent
So having a reliable and flexible data platform is crucial. The repeatability of data flows built in CloverDX makes onboarding new locations easier and more transparent. Chris explains:
“Once you have a connection to a system, we already have the flow of how to send information. So just adding a system, we just integrate it into the flow and we’re done. We standardize the flow, build it once, and roll it out. And we know what’s happening – we’re monitoring it.”
Nachalle Kortrink emphasizes the importance of onboarding new locations quickly to make sure the company’s BI data is accurate: “We need to make sure we integrate each acquisition as fast as possible so we can get the information into our systems. The BI reporting is really important for the executives, so we have a clear overview of what’s being sold.”
Accurate, reliable data
Nachalle adds: “We’ve had a real culture change here – more and more people realize they should be more data-driven to achieve the turnover and sales they’re looking for.”
And CloverDX is helping the BI team provide accurate, reliable data across the organization.
One of the challenges such a complex, multi-application environment creates is being able to see what’s happening with the data flows across the business. Van Mossel are using CloverDX to monitor their data processes and alert them to any errors, and Nachalle explains that CloverDX “enables the team to easily see what’s happening in the data as it flows through the process.”
"CloverDX enables the team to easily see what's happening in the data as it flows through the process"
With CloverDX, every data process is monitored, and easy-to-understand dashboards, visual data flows, and error alerts ensure things are running as intended.
Streamlining data integration with CloverDX
The complexity for Van Mossel’s processes comes from the large number of applications they’re working with, the amount of data that needs to flow between them, and the speed with which the company is expanding and bringing new entities into the Van Mossel infrastructure.
CloverDX gives the rapidly growing company a centralized place to create, manage and monitor all their data integrations, so, as Koenraad summarizes: “… the data can get from A to B, so we make sure all our systems have the right information, the right data, and can work, so the bills get paid.”
About Van Mossel Automotive Group
Van Mossel Automotive Group is a family business that has grown into the largest automotive company in the Benelux in more than 75 years, with more than 6,700 employees. There are over 452 branches in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom. More than 170,000 cars are sold every year, and the company also manages services including leasing, insurance, financing, damage repair, energy, commercial vehicle personalisation, fleet management and maintenance.
Case Study: Enabling data integration across the Van Mossel Automotive Group
