01 Starting point
A car dealership collects customer data in several places at once: through enquiries on the website, through dealer accounts in the B2B shop, and through direct sales in the showroom. Each of these sources keeps its own list, with its own fields and its own spelling. The same customer then exists several times over, and nobody can say for certain which record is the current one.
In the motor trade there is a further point: customer and vehicle belong together, and they stay together for years — purchase, servicing, part exchange, the next purchase. Without a shared data base that history cannot be evaluated, and sales work depends on what individual staff happen to remember. Standard CRM systems cover contacts and quotes, but rarely the vehicle links that matter here.
02 Solution
The basis is CCM2, which we are extending for this project. The data model is cut for the motor trade: customer, company, vehicle and case are separate objects with defined relationships, so the history of a vehicle and the history of a customer can be looked at separately and together.
The connection runs through interfaces to the existing systems. Enquiries from the TYPO3 website, and accounts and cases from the Shopware 6 marketplace, feed into the same data base, together with what sales record themselves. A matching step with duplicate-detection rules makes one record out of three sources instead of three dead entries. Roles and permissions govern who sees and edits what.
It is built in PHP 8 against MariaDB and operated on servers in Germany. Development runs in stages: data model and import first, then the working interfaces for the individual departments. The project is at that stage now.
03 Result
The project is running. Statements about results would be premature here, so this is the goal instead: one data base in which customer and vehicle are held together, and from which the website, the B2B shop and sales read the same truth.
The approach is deliberately incremental. Instead of one cut-over date, data sources are connected one after another and working areas go live one after another, so that day-to-day business at the dealership does not have to stop while it happens.