Customer Scenario: Car Lot Inventory 

The scenario describes why our team has been brought to together. Our objective is to understand the customer’s problem, the context of their business, and design and implement improvements to meet their organizational needs. 

Problem Statement 

Customers have a bad experience when they attempt to purchase a vehicle in our inventory if it has already been sold. We are constantly updating our inventory and by the time the paperwork gets to the inventory manager, it is several hours late. Customers make it through the purchase process with our salesclerk only to find out at the last minute the vehicle had already sold. Today we track our inventory using paper briefs that include the car make, model, year, purchase price, selling price, sold price, new/used, and current status (sold, on hold, acquired, for sale, or destroyed). Once the inventory manager is informed of a change in inventory (e.g., sold car), they will amend or remove the brief from the stack of available vehicles. As we grow in sales and number of vehicles on the lot, we need a better way to manage the inventory.  

Context 

Car Lots R’ Us has been serving the surrounding 3 counties for nearly 30 years. Located on Car Avenue in Lindowsville, we have potential to serve a total population of nearly 400,000 residents. Today we are the go-to for new and used vehicle purchases with nearly 500 vehicles sold per month. We do all business on the lot, no website, and this has been a stable model for us, but we see the need to modernize to attract younger and savvy buyers. 

Success 

We need a simple web interface to manage the vehicles in our inventory. We will start with support for listing, adding, removing, and updating a vehicle title, description, and status. When updating vehicle status, only acquired, on hold (such as for repairs), sold, for sale, and destroyed are allowed. We need this data to persist over time and not be lost when closing the browser. We will run the new service with the inventory manager. This manager may add new vehicles, remove vehicles, and update the vehicle status. Over time, we need to improve this service so that we can roll it out to sales and maintenance staff, eventually allowing staff to manage inventory from their mobile device and for consumers to see our inventory online. 

Tools and Technologies 

Every professional has a set of tools they use to manage and achieve the goal. Often these tools look different based on your role on a project and even between different customer projects. For this POD we’ve chosen a suite of tools that your role as a developer will use most often. 

The list below highlights the name of technology type and a tool that fits the need. For example, Version Control is the practice of storing, managing, and versioning application or infrastructure source code. Git is a tool that you use to interact with and version source code. GitHub company remotely hosts source code using Git source control technology and we interact with the remote code using the Git tool.