Setting up a digital factory and a customer portal
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Tarik Hennings

Technical Product Owner as subcontractor of the consulting company Etribes with customer Knauf

Our first Challenge.

During COVID Knauf realized that they were missing a digital strategy and that their customer interaction within the building industry was still relying on paper instead of digital systems. Together with our partner Etribes Knauf developed a concept for setting up a digital factory and build the first customer facing online portal for building materials.

Our mission:  Set up a new digital unit with a target headcount of 90 people and 5 teams working in parallel creating the new Knauf digital product portfolio.

The main goal was digitizing the customer experience for Knauf within 12 month. This was a huge challenge for Knauf and for Etribes, because new agile teams had to be set up and old teams had to merge within the structure.

Our mission was to set up different teams. We started with the role as the Technical Product Owner creating the initial team. Technical PO in the Knauf context means a crossover between Engineering Manager and PO. This role has to handle the technical complexity of the project in order to integrate align other workstreams streams.

ITUBs Mission consists of 3 elements from the consulting company side:

  1. Create the order portal with teams for the customer and go live within 9 months with green field project
  2. Introduce and enable the agile transformation of the customer Knauf in order to enable Knauf to build the products onside after Etribes engagement
  3. Consulting and setting up the role structure in dev teams for longterm: PO, TPO, EM, Devs
  4. Clean fade out and handover to local teams

Accomplishments

  1. First accomplishment of the first product increment was setting up the boilerplate and building microservice architecture connecting the data as the service stream in order to show first order data after 3 months.
  2. Second accomplishment was working out the authorization concept and requirements and with that setting up the new authorization team. The responsibility was setting up the Auth team and enabling a new junior PO from junior to PO during the second product increment phase after 6 months.
  3. Third accomplishment was the go-live in 2 lead markets with a working platform after 9 months.

So overall we were able to enable the customer Knauf with setting up his digital unit. We enabled Etribes to deliver a project with excellent personal and high skilled people setting up each team for Etribes.

Topics covered during the project period

- UI/UX development for order portal and user/admin account
- data integration of the data as a service project stream
- customer identity and access management project stream
- authorization & authentication
- error handling
- GraphQL implementation
- Okta integration
- Testing
- business logic for 5 countries (core; specific)

Used technologies and services

- Authorization: Okta as identify provider
- Microservices: NestJS + react; GraphQL Apollo Federation
- DevOps: Microsoft Azure, Event Bus, Elasticsearch, HELM, ArgoCI/CD

Our responsibilities

- Technical Product Owner Knauf unlimited order platform
- Team setup of the Team Order Service and building the Knauf Order Portal; Go live with 2 Lead markets after 8 month
- Team setup of the Auth Team and enablement to develop Auth Service: Development of Authorization and Authentication concept using Okta
- Cross Stream communication and cross team alignment between Data as a Service, Okta Stream, Lead Project Manager and CMS Team
- User Authorization in Knauf Unlimited