Connected Trucks The right subscription for every truck

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 the thousands of trucks and corresponding subscriptions, since we’re talking about sizable amounts every month. Fleet managers also needed a user-friendly way to search and filter by user, truck or subscription so they could answer questions quickly.

We arrange management of subscriptions and invoicing through Zuora, which is definitely the platform you want to use for this purpose. 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 catalogue, including prices, invoicing and taxes. This allows DAF to carry out automatic invoicing runs via the various payment methods that customers can choose from.

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. For DAF, this portal marks the start of offering subscription-based services.

Working closely with our partner Subscription Factory, we tackled this process as an 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 a great first step, helping everyone to get off to a comfortable start together.

As soon as the frameworks were in place, we started the first sprint, maintaining close contact with stakeholders from DAF. DAF knows the users and their products (trucks and apps) better than anyone – better than we ever could, in our role as external specialists. 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.