Iconic Car Manufacturer Uses ‘Containerised’ IT to Deliver Competitive Advantage

Reference

The Mission

Our customer needed to perform a major upgrade of their enterprise connectivity. The objectives were to improve reliability and capacity, and to reduce overall operating cost of their not inconsiderable enterprise integration estate.

Containerised Solution

Responsiv led the project and were responsible for all deliverables.

We worked with the inhouse IT operations team and systems integrator to envision, design, and develop a cloud native, containerised integration solution that could move with the business. The new design featured encapsulated connectivity “nodes” that could be managed independently, and a clear separation between manufacturing, financial, data synchronisation, and supply chain data. 

The result was a solution that addressed and met all objectives and that could be tested and deployed in a cost effective, iterative manner.

Products and services relevant to this reference include Responsiv Consulting, Responsiv JumpStart®, IBM MQ, Enterprise Integration, IBM Integration, IBM Application Connect Enterprise (ACE), IBM WebSphere, Responsiv Unity.

Our Customer

Our customer is a global automotive manufacturer and leading technology company with a reputation founded on two iconic British car brands. Their driving desire is to deliver class-leading vehicles and driving experiences that people love – for life.

The company employs 40,000 people across the world, with vehicle assembly plants in the UK, China, Brazil, India, Austria and Slovakia. Their business supports a further 260,000 people through their retailer network, suppliers and local businesses.

Legacy IT threatened to impact revenues

The existing IT infrastructure was large, complex, and played a critical role in everyday operations – acting as the heartbeat of manufacturing and running the entire organisation including production lines. Its outdated technology and was undermining business initiatives, and in urgent need of upgrade.

Production line failures impact “Just in Time” supply chains, workers, customer orders, and cashflow. It is an expensive business that must be avoided.

Put simply, if a production line becomes unavailable it has a wide and damaging impact that takes time to recover, even after the line returns to normal. Impact to cashflow and profits are significant.

Responsiv understand these business considerations, and ensure that our planning and technical designs lend themselves to minimising risk and assuring that all stakeholders are properly informed.

In this case legacy customisations were not compatible with many new products, making like-for-like upgrade impossible A more strategic approach was required.

With this in mind, Responsiv was asked to design and develop a viable IT solution to get the company where it needed to be. This meant that we needed to design and build a consistent approach to all stages of ongoing development and support:

Enterprise DevOps

Responsiv Consulting developed an opinionated stack to deliver DevOps that supported containerised deployment and testing, and integrated with business decision makers and across different systems and processes. Our stack included IBM Business Process Manager (BPM,BAW,DBA) to allow the DevOps pipeline to extend to non-technical staff for authorisations, requirements, and scheduling replays and meetings between technical and business teams.

Speak to Responsiv Consulting for more information about how DevOps can be integrated across multiple projects and the enterprise.

Enterprise Development

• Use enterprise process automation to integrate technical (DevOps) processes with business decision makers. This delivered a cross-enterprise coordination of change, and ensured that systems impacted by change were properly authorised and risk assessed.
• Use enterprise process automation to connect IT tools such as Meven, Heat, GitHub, and solution tooling in a consistent and adaptable manner.
• Use containerisation to facilitate resetting test data, and to enabling highly parallel and scalable test environments
• Use enterprise process automation to assure that all changes to critical production systems passed through testing and acceptance – every time.

Containerised of Enterprise Operations

• Use Containers to facilitate distribution of the solution elements across multiple clouds and private data centres. This delivers high degrees of resilience, and optimises data movement between clouds.
• Use Responsiv Unity technology to deliver containerised full stack monitoring and alerting.

Following a successful proof of concept, Responsiv created an agile, secure pre-production environment incorporating all the necessary upgrades required to bring our customer’s IT up to date without disrupting existing operations.

We comprehensively stress-tested the solution by sending duplicated data traffic to our new solution, process by process. If it was managed successfully, we released the new version.

This standardised approach minimised testing costs, production risk and upgrade costs: all with positive results. Along the way, we ensured a culture of continuous improvement by feeding back any learning into subsequent testing cycles.

In Summary

Ultimately, Responsiv created an innovative DevOps environment with a server capable of quickly spinning up testing environments – saving our customer a great deal of time and management.

We leveraged Responsiv’s own development sandboxes to avoid customer cost, and deployed a pre-production platform to Google Cloud to avoid impacting existing operations and resources.

A solution designed for today’s automotive industry – delivered on time, within budget, and meeting objectives.

By working together and understanding our customer’s commercial challenges and technology requirements, we have successfully evolved IT away from the now-redundant model of buying traditional hardware and running fixed software on it, to a ‘containerised’ agile IT infrastructure which can flex and adapt to changing demands in order to deliver consistently competitive performance.

Our Products

Responsiv Consulting

Installations, Problem Resolution, Performance reviews, fixed price projects, services for assistance, custom agreements.

Responsiv Consulting is an asset-based professional services organisation. Our consultants use our accelerators, experience, and skills to assure on-time delivery to the agreed specification.

We provide trusted advice to C-level and technical leaders. Our advice is often technology agnostic, focusing instead on how to successfully deliver large projects, how to align technology to business strategy, and how to ensure that projects and contracts are properly constructed.

https://Responsiv.co.uk/responsiv-consulting

Responsiv Assist

Installation audit, Penetration testing, Problem Management, SSL Certificate Monitoring, Licence Optimisation, Performance reviews.

Responsiv Assist provides support for our managed services and cloud hosting, as well as ad-hoc remote support for your developers, operators, and architects.

Responsiv Assist provides incident support to maintain your services and is accessed through the Responsiv Assist portal (responsiv.co.uk/support).

https://Responsiv.co.uk/responsiv-assist

Responsiv Unity

Oversight console, integration to Office 365 and enterprise monitoring, Automation, Integration, available as a service, custom agreements.

Responsiv Unity is a modular enterprise automation platform that can be purchased incrementally as your need for additional function and capacity grows. Responsiv Unity is available for self-installation or as a service.

https://Responsiv.co.uk/responsiv-unity

Responsiv Resale

Responsiv is a reseller and system integrator for Microsoft, IBM, and Red Hat software.