Keep on trucking
DAF Connect provides fleet owners with real-time insight into the performance and status of their fleet. This online portal is the core of DAF’s Connected Driving activities. rb2 built a portal for DAF in which fleet managers can purchase additional functionalities within DAF Connect on a subscription basis.
Each and every truck has the connected functionalities needed for that specific vehicle. This allows fleet managers to deploy their fleet as cost-effectively as possible because they only have to pay for the functionality that they use.
The Challenge
Vehicle managers have to take care of a huge number of different factors within a fleet. Managing the subscriptions of a whole fleet, sometimes involving thousands of trucks, is just too much manual work. DAF wanted fleet managers everywhere to easily be able to start, stop, and adjust vehicle subscriptions to cut down on their work and keep track of their costs.
The Answer
A combination of custom rb2 technology and Zuora was chosen for the development of the DAF platform. The Zuora platform serves as a product catalog, including prices, invoicing, and taxes.
The Result
The introduction of Zuora allows DAF to carry out automatic invoicing runs via the various payment methods that customers can choose from. This removes a huge amount of manual work that stops fleet managers from focusing on more important tasks.
Too Much To Manage
If a user needs to manage a single subscription or just a handful, the task is not all that complex or time-consuming. But what about a fleet manager who has to manage the subscriptions of a whole fleet, sometimes involving thousands of trucks. How do you easily start or cancel a subscription for one truck? Or for all trucks of a certain type? And last but certainly not least, how do you keep costs under control?
The user experience within the portal was also extremely important. It needed to be efficient and easy to manage thousands of trucks with multiple subscriptions per vehicle. Fleet managers also needed a user-friendly way to search and filter by user, truck, or subscription so they could answer questions quickly.
Pit Stop
Working closely with our partner Subscription Factory, we tackled this process as a Minimum Value Product (MVP). DAF had bold ambitions, so we wanted to get results quickly.
Before the first sprint, we held a couple of intense refinement sessions to map out the entire landscape. Integrating new (external) components into your own IT landscape is always tricky. It was important to analyze the impact at an early stage and to think ahead about the long-term sustainability of such integrations. On the one hand, everyone wants to dive in as soon as possible. But mapping out the most important components and their impact on the existing IT environment is the best first step, helping everyone to get comfortable at the start.
As soon as the frameworks were in place, we started the first sprint, maintaining close contact with stakeholders from DAF. DAF are specialists and so they know their users and their products (trucks and apps) better than anyone else. By incorporating feedback loops at the right times, we made sure that we built exactly what DAF and their customers and users needed. These short feedback loops made it possible for us to make adjustments quickly, arriving at the ideal MVP.
Delivering Choice
A combination of custom rb2 technology and Zuora was chosen for the development of the DAF platform. DAF now has a solid portal where fleet managers can perform any action they like regarding the subscriptions for their trucks.
Considering the complexity and diversity of the functionalities that DAF needed, we implemented nearly all Zuora features in the portal for fleet managers. The Zuora platform serves as a product catalog, including prices, invoicing, and taxes. This allows DAF to carry out automatic invoicing runs via the various payment methods that customers can choose from.
For DAF, this portal marks the start of offering subscription-based services and we’re excited to help them with their next steps further into the subscription service environment.
