Replacing Excel in quality labs worldwide

Continental’s global Quality Laboratories needed to standardise how they worked. Every site had its own variations, and the shared layer between them was Excel — forms filled in by hand, reports assembled by hand. CLIVE was the digital platform meant to replace that.

What I built

I joined as a core developer on a greenfield application and laid out the base structure for all components. Over three years it grew from a multi-repo Angular library setup into a micro-frontend architecture using Module Federation, sitting on top of microservices.

The workflow digitisation was the point of the project: manual Excel-based form completion and reporting were replaced with real workflows, cutting processing time drastically.

The UI layer

We started on Angular Material because it was fast. As the product’s identity firmed up, Material’s opinions became the constraint rather than the accelerator — so I designed and led development of a custom Tailwind CSS component library, documented with Storybook.

Delivery and people

I improved the CI/CD pipelines with automated linting, formatting and deployment through GitHub Actions. I also mentored and evaluated developers on Angular, .NET Core and documentation practice — on a project running for years across multiple sites, the documentation is not optional.

What I’d do differently

The move to micro-frontends was right, but we made it later than we should have. By then several teams had already built around the assumption of a single deployable.