Car wreck auction platform

We have collaborated with Atotal Insurtech (owned by Generali) – a large Hungarian claim settlement service company – to build a car wreck auction platform.

About the project

We have collaborated with Atotal Insurtech to modernize and enhance an existing car wreck auction system which enables insurance companies to sell wrecked vehicles.

Location:

Hungary

Industry:

Insurance

Services:

Digital product development

Business type:

Enterprise

Challenges

The company used the auction system to auction off the car wrecks to car repair shops. The software itself was already in production for many years, but it was insecure, the UI was old-fashioned and not having access to the source meant that it was closed to extension.

The Client needed a solution that was modern and up to the standards of the current web pages with flexibility both in code and UI to be easily extended to other domains – not just car wreck auction, but offering repair services to customers as well – in the near future.

Solution

After studying the workflows of the old system, we created a new website to handle all the previous use cases while optimizing and modernizing them and automating the manual processes.

We enhanced the original registration workflow by improving the emailing system and allowing on-the-fly editing for the site operator of the outgoing email templates and attachments. We made the new site much more secure by using modern programming techniques both on the UI (protecting paths) and the API side (like using API keys instead of sending username-password pairs for authentication). Besides these enhancements, the site received new pages to improve user experience, like showing dashboards to the operator and customers with relevant data. By separating the frontend and backend responsibilities, we made it much easier for other software to integrate with the new site.

During the process, we talked with the customer on a daily basis, which helped us bring more improvements: we connected the software to both the National Tax and Customs Administration’s (NAV) API and szamlazz.hu’s accounting API. This allowed us to free the customer from a lot of manual labor, by checking the fetching the data of new partners from official sources and making sure the right items and information are present on the outgoing invoices.

By using modern software architecture principles, only a few changes were needed – done in a couple of days – to serve not just as a car wreck auction software, but also as a repair service auction site.

The deployment and data storage are designed so the site can be set up on a new empty machine within a minute and can be restored to a previous state using a couple of commands by the maintainer.

Results

The new site is much more secure while also giving effective tools and power to the operator and a better experience for every user.

By integrating the site with szamlazz.hu’s and NAV’s API, we eliminated a category of errors that arose because of manual labor in this area, like misspelling tax numbers or accidentally not including an item on the invoice.