As a leading global technology consultancy we are enabling enterprises like Mercedes-Benz AG to thrive as modern digital businesses. The company focuses on the development, production and sales of passenger cars, vans and vehicle-related services.
To meet the quickly changing and new evolving needs and buying preferences of its global customers and teams, the company’s digital capabilities — and the processes that surround them — need to be future-ready and highly adaptable. That’s where we from Thoughtworks came in as a partner to support within this digital transformation.
Creating a new foundation for scalable sales and end-to-end ownership
Our partnership journey began with a series of discovery sessions and workshops that helped our teams understand the current design, processes, and history of the company’s on-premises sales systems.
Initially, we were brought on board to deliver new capabilities directly into the company’s on-premises systems. But through our discovery process, we identified that we have to think bigger to strengthen the ability to innovate, scale, grow globally in the future and to react more quickly to changes in a dynamic world.
We quickly identified how using the public cloud could help strengthen the company’s digital capabilities and enable digital sales transformation, and began building a plan to get the company’s sales infrastructure and capabilities into the cloud.
With multiple diverse systems to migrate, we created and implemented a flexible digital platform that would help ease and accelerate cloud migration and modernization.
To meet the needs of the company and its customers, the new platform needed to integrate with the company’s existing sales infrastructure, deliver smooth developer experiences, and provide a secure and flexible path to access dynamic and scalable cloud services.
To make that happen, we designed and delivered Cloud Engine - a solution running on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in just nine months. Cloud Engine is a platform that helps support cloud transformation and makes it easy for the sales IT teams to migrate data and digital services to the cloud, and use leading cloud capabilities to build new cloud-native functionality.
Enabling a digital mindset evolution
The Cloud Engine platform is designed around a shared governance model, allowing teams to be independent in building their applications in the cloud while providing guardrails that help maintain high levels of security, availability, and interoperability.
By providing a foundation to bring complex systems together, the platform has helped simplify business processes and enable more efficient interaction between services — creating seamless digital experiences. Plus, product teams are empowered to help themselves to the resources they need in the cloud, significantly improving their productivity while cutting the time it takes to bring new and improved services to market.
But perhaps most significantly, all of those changes have come together to enable a major mindset shift and evolution in how the company views, manages, and gets the most from its technology. Software development practices have evolved, teams are empowered to innovate using leading public capabilities, and the organization has embraced platform and product thinking.
The Cloud Engine platform enables the sales transformation the company wanted to drive today. But the mindset evolution that happened around it will help the organization continuously evolve its capabilities and improve its digital offerings for many years to come.
Ushering in a new era of customer-centric automotive sales
By providing an accessible and intuitive alternative to legacy on-premise platforms, built to enable continuous delivery and maintain high levels of security, governance, and resilience in the cloud, the Cloud Engine platform has streamlined the sales team’s journey to the cloud.
Now, sales IT teams can deliver new services to customers much faster, connect data sources and existing services to build rich new capabilities, and rapidly scale their capabilities to meet rising global demand.
With the full power, flexibility, and scale of the cloud at their fingertips, the company’s teams are empowered to deliver exceptional buying experiences, and continuously bring new experiences directly to its customers — helping it achieve its overarching sales transformation goals.
Every project we work on has a strong impact on our clients, but the Cloud Engine project has had a major impact on our organization too. It’s seen as a real benchmark of cloud success, and has helped us define new internal best practices for similar projects.
Following its deployment, Cloud Engine has achieved widespread recognition across the organization. Looking to the future, the company is expanding use of the platform across the business, enabling more teams and functions to embark on a rapid, high-value cloud transformation journey, keeping the company at the forefront of digital innovation.
