Sun Chemical Colors & Effects GmbH

Introduction

Sun Chemical Colors & Effects GmbH was originally a subsidiary of BASF and now belongs to DIC Corporation/Sun Chemical. The company specialises in the pigment sector, and in particular raw pigments. These are necessary for a wide variety of products such as in the cosmetic industry, for plastics, printing and painting as well as in the agriculture industry.

Challenge

The initial task was a B2B search engine for pigments. Gradually, additional requirements arose, so that the collaboration resulted in a general service platform for documents and data which is used worldwide in branches in Ludwigshafen, Michigan and China.

A new addition is the PigmentViewer, a digital colour fan, which provides the possibility of assessing the appearance of pigments from various perspectives.

Solution

At the core of the service platform, there is an Elasticsearch instance which is populated using Silverstripe CMS. A mulit-node service architecture with Silverstripe CMS and Node.js services gradually emerged on the AWS platform. New features are implemented based on AWS cloud-native services, mainly lambda functions, SNS, SQS, S3 and CloudFront.

The international focus and large data volumes have made specialised solutions necessary, especially for the Chinese market.

The apps are developed in Ionic and are also populated from the central service platform.