Helping an automotive giant with a comprehensive cloud migration and service contract function transformation

In 2021, a luxury and commercial vehicle manufacturer decided to split its main business into two unique entities to remain competitive and provide its manufacturing divisions with increased autonomy. The restructuring of the company’s luxury car and global heavy vehicle producers required the separation of all technological landscapes, as each entity catered to specific customer groups, technology paths, and capital needs.

The two new entities shared common infrastructure, processes, and data – with the critical infrastructure being managed by a unified entity. The newly formed truck manufacturer could not use the existing PaaS, as the enterprise data center was not offering new PaaS instances and it had not been included in the transitional service agreement.

Of particular importance was the international contract management system, which was originally hosted within a hybrid cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) under the oversight of one of the newly formed entities. This meant that the other newly established division found itself in the position of having to investigate alternative options for infrastructure, hosting, and data management to support its operations.

A complex re-organization effort was initiated, which was aimed at partitioning the overarching IT infrastructure and data systems. This ultimately resulted in the establishment of two separate hosting platforms, each dedicated to the specific needs of the commercial and luxury vehicle segments. So, the newly formed divisions partnered with Capgemini to explore alternate platforms to migrate all data within an agreed upon timeframe.

Fresh ideas, a future ready platform, and a quick migration with ADMnext

The Capgemini team began by preparing a comprehensive roadmap, comprising a host of different ADMnext solutions.

The journey started with a GRIP workshop that offered a collaborative, co-innovation hub where ideas could be brainstormed and the strategy for separating the entities was planned. The global commercial vehicle manufacturing division had a large number of active service contracts spread across 10 live markets, each of which needed to be migrated to a new platform. So, the Capgemini team offered a Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) platform to host the next-gen technology stack and enable the future migration to a public cloud.

The migration took place in three critical stages, which included:

• Making the contract management system compatible with the CaaS platform
• Ensuring that the application source code was integrated with both the PaaS and CaaS
• Separating critical data of diverse sizes from across multiple tables and ensuring that there was a built-in mechanism to detect any data anomalies.

Within a record five months, the team delivered the contract management system with zero impact on the organization’s live businesses. Overall, Capgemini:

• Enabled a comprehensive, disruption-free public cloud transition with the delivery of a modern CaaS contract management system equipped with a future-ready tech stack
• Set up the development, integration, pre-production, and production environments – which are free of manual intervention – with a streamlined Infrastructure-as-a-Code solution
• Helped reshape the entire service contract function of the two new entities, including cloud strategy, apification via domain-driven design, and integration with the company’s digital backbone, via a well-defined roadmap.

Planning fresh future paths to success

With this automotive giant set to move ahead via two fresh, independent business entities, it has entrusted the Capgemini team to begin developing a future roadmap, which includes a supplementary cloud strategy, re-alignment rollouts in the German market, and a full integration with digital channels. In 2023, Capgemini has emerged as the main desired strategic partner and the company has already seen a two-fold increase from new avenues of engagements.