Case Study

Internal intranet portal for a manufacturing company

A central, web-based platform that brings together numerous operational processes of a mid-sized industrial company – from ERP analysis and staff and capacity planning to printer, fleet and certificate management. I designed, built and operate the application single-handedly in production.

Tech stack

Backend: PHP 8.2+, Symfony 7.4 (Security, Messenger, Scheduler, Notifier, LDAP, Mailer)
Frontend: Twig, Tailwind CSS, Symfony UX / Stimulus (Turbo, Chart.js) – around 60 Stimulus controllers
Data access: Doctrine DBAL with several parallel connections to existing systems
Authentication: Active Directory / LDAP (custom user provider, SSO)
Async: Symfony Messenger + Redis + Scheduler
Documents: mPDF, TCPDF, FPDI, Browsershot (PDF); PhpSpreadsheet (Excel)

Challenges & solutions

1. Connecting several legacy databases

The data was spread across various existing systems (including an ERP). Instead of a classic ORM model, I deliberately use Doctrine DBAL with multiple connections and hand-optimised SQL queries – allowing external systems to be read and analysed without endangering their schemas.

2. Central authentication via the company AD

Users should not have to register again. I built a custom LDAP user provider that authenticates against Active Directory and reads out roles. On top of that sits a modular permission system that enables each feature module individually.

3. Long-running tasks do not block the UI

Large Excel exports, printer status queries, automatic warning emails and cleanup jobs run asynchronously via Symfony Messenger (Redis) and are partly scheduled via the Scheduler. The interface stays responsive.

4. Document generation in many formats

Labels, certificates and reports need to be generated ready to print. I combine several PDF engines depending on the requirement and additionally deliver ERP reports as Excel.

My role

I am the sole developer and maintainer: architecture, backend, frontend, database integration, deployment and ongoing operations are entirely my responsibility. The application is used in production and continuously extended with new modules.

Result

A platform used in production with more than 25 functional modules. Scattered manual processes and isolated solutions were replaced by a central, AD-integrated access point – maintainable, extensible and built on a modern Symfony stack.