Dealer-Platform Modularisation Director

The mandate

The dealer platform bundles catalogue search, fitment, pricing, warranty, workshop booking and claims inside one release train, while every brand and country maintains overrides. A catalogue change can therefore delay warranty processing, and local teams bypass the platform to meet workshop needs. The defined problem is to create modular product and data boundaries that allow useful variation without breaking vehicle, part, dealer, customer and claim integrity.

The deliverables are a journey-and-dependency map, target capability boundaries, authoritative entity model, interface contracts, variation policy, migration sequence and investment dossier. The design must cover vehicle identity, superseded parts, fitment, price conditions, dealer roles, technician workflows, warranty eligibility, evidence and settlement. It must show where orchestration belongs and prevent “modular” from meaning many services sharing the same undocumented database and coordinated release.

Four milestones structure five months: week four accepts the current coupling and market-variation evidence; week ten approves target boundaries and authoritative entities through scenario walkthroughs; week sixteen completes a migration rehearsal for one dealer journey; and week twenty-two delivers sequencing, operating ownership, cost, risk and executive choices. The consulting fee is billed against those accepted milestones.

Acceptance requires independent teams to change a representative catalogue or warranty rule without unplanned impact on another domain, two markets to classify variations consistently and a complete dealer journey to reconcile across target contracts. The council also expects ownership for shared reference data, explicit latency and failure behaviour, a route for legacy overrides and no hidden requirement that all domains deploy together.

The client provides platform architecture, databases, release histories, incident records, dealer research, catalogue and warranty rules, variation registers, integration contracts, operational measures and access to market experts. The consultant does not write production services, select vendors, approve warranty policy, change dealer prices, design workshop procedures, migrate data or operate releases. Client product and architecture leaders implement the accepted design.

Why this is external work

Each domain team describes the present platform through its own screens and backlog, while regional teams see only the overrides they rely upon. Earlier modularisation proposals started from technical layers and failed to explain operating ownership. External direction can follow dealer decisions across brands and markets, expose semantic coupling and produce boundaries grounded in change independence rather than fashionable architecture vocabulary.

What you will own

• Trace dealer journeys across vehicle identity, catalogue, fitment, price, workshop, warranty, evidence, claim and settlement dependencies.
• Identify hidden coupling in databases, batch work, shared configuration, organisational approvals, release trains and regional overrides.
• Define capability boundaries and authoritative entities with ownership, consistency, latency, failure and history requirements.
• Establish variation rules separating brand proposition, lawful market need, dealer operation and avoidable historical customisation.
• Design interface contracts and orchestration for representative happy, exception, offline, supersession and disputed-warranty scenarios.
• Sequence migration using dealer value, change demand, semantic confidence, coexistence burden and reversible operational proof.
• Deliver the target model, rehearsal evidence, ownership, economics, transition risks and decisions reserved for executives.

Candidate qualifications

• Has modularised a dealer, aftermarket or complex distribution platform containing product, commercial and service domains.
• Understands vehicle and part identity, supersession, fitment, pricing conditions, workshop flow, warranty evidence and settlement.
• Can expose semantic and organisational coupling hidden behind apparently separate services or modern interface layers.
• Has governed market and brand variation without preserving every local override or forcing harmful global uniformity.
• Has validated boundaries through independent change and end-to-end operational scenarios before recommending implementation investment.
• Produces migration designs that product, architecture, dealer operations, finance and regional teams can use without consultant translation.

Non-negotiables

• Can work the Pune hybrid cadence and complete all dealer observations and the European brand-design council.
• Will disclose relationships with vehicle manufacturers, dealer groups, platform vendors, parts networks and systems integrators.
• Brings domain-led modularisation of an operating dealer or distribution platform; microservices design alone is insufficient.
• Will not call a boundary independent if it still depends on shared undocumented data or coordinated ordinary releases.

1. 49 words maximum. Which dealer-platform entity should own a superseded part’s fitment history, and why?
2. 49 words maximum. How would you prove two proposed domains can change independently in operating practice?
3. 49 words maximum. What local variation would you preserve even if it complicates the global platform?