A 140-year heritage of innovation and quality
Since its beginnings in 1886 as a ‘Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering’, Robert Bosch GmbH has been committed to innovating with a purpose. Today, the global Bosch Group designs its technology and services to spark enthusiasm, improve quality of life and help conserve natural resources.
One part of the Bosch Group — Bosch Mobility Aftermarket — provides diagnostic and workshop equipment and spare parts for passenger cars and commercial vehicles, and has built a strong reputation for reliability and quality with customers worldwide.
Challenge: Inflexible on-premises systems hinder business decision-making
With a huge range of equipment and parts, coupled with a global customer base, Bosch Mobility Aftermarket relies on deriving insights from vast quantities of data to understand how to serve its customers better and respond to emerging opportunities.
Bosch Mobility Aftermarket already operated a comprehensive reporting landscape to support its business operations. As business requirements continued to evolve and the volume and variety of data increased, the organization identified opportunities to further enhance flexibility, scalability and the speed at which insights could be delivered to users.
To unlock additional value from its data and support future growth, Bosch Mobility Aftermarket partnered with Thoughtworks to modernize its data platform. The initiative was designed to streamline data access across systems and enable even faster, more reliable delivery of insights for business users.
Solution: A modern data platform — and modern engineering practices
Thoughtworks began with an in-depth discovery process to quickly understand the organization’s needs, stakeholders’ pain points and priorities, and the existing technical challenges.
Based on a thorough understanding of the goals, we outlined a potential solution approach and built an MVP of a new data platform on Microsoft Azure and Databricks in just three months. We designed the data platform to be future-ready, offering the scalability to support the organization’s ambitious growth plans, the performance to handle complex workloads efficiently and the flexibility to adapt to future business needs. The project has now moved beyond the MVP, expanding to include more source systems, pipelines and business users, as many business units wanted to take advantage of the new data platform.
We also recognized the importance of further strengthening Bosch Mobility Aftermarket’s existing engineering capabilities with additional modern practices and approaches to support the platform’s long-term success. So, we provided hands-on training and mentoring to build the skills required and embed engineering excellence best practices across the in-house team. This included future-oriented training to prepare the team to implement AI and advanced analytics use cases.
As part of this AI readiness initiative, Thoughtworks also provided a clear path and recommendations for bringing the most promising AI use cases into production. This will help Bosch Mobility Aftermarket prioritize and implement high-value AI capabilities that deliver a measurable return with minimal investment.
Outcome: Faster insights and a future-ready data foundation
With faster time to insight, teams across Bosch Mobility Aftermarket can now respond to business challenges and opportunities with increased agility and dynamism.
For example, Power BI reports that previously took four to five hours to refresh now take just five minutes, enabling decision-makers to act with speed and confidence.
We empowered the organization’s in-house engineering team with the knowledge, skills and self-sufficiency to maintain high performance and strong data governance — and implement the advanced use cases that will support the next stage of Bosch Mobility Aftermarket’s growth.
The company’s data team has achieved what many other teams and organizations dream of — they’ve generated a pull effect. The data platform instantly provided huge value, prompting several more business units to want to get involved.
The success of this initiative demonstrates the importance of applying technical excellence in a collaborative, future-focused way. Bosch Mobility Aftermarket now has a strong but flexible data foundation for increased business agility, and a team with the skills and autonomy to achieve great things in the future.
