Situation
Our client, a leader in the manufacturing industry, has been developing and deploying complex on-premise manufacturing solutions involving sofware and hardware around the world for years. Despite its commercial success, it became clear that the business model could not scale anymore. Product customizations, usage of legacy technologies and working in a non-agile manner made it more and more difficult to start new projects for new clients.
The company's management team therefore decided to launch an ambitious project to address these issues and take their business to the next level in the digital age. The vision was to build a cloud platform leveraging a microservices architecture and the latest Platform-as-a-Services (PaaS) technologies to accelerate time to market of new solutions while decreasing overall operational costs.
Approach
The team of Open Web Technology, together with the client, defined a three step approach to turn this vision into reality:
Crystalize vision and gap analysis: The goals in this first phase were on the one hand to crystalize the vision aligning senior management both from engineering and business, and on the other hand to identify the gaps to address in order to build the platform, ranging from technical, organizational, methodological and cultural.
Blueprint: The second step focused on specifying, from a functional and technical point of view, the platform and services to run on it. This phase was carried out by a small team of OWT and client resources with mixed skills. As part of this blueprint we also supported our client in the selection of the PaaS solution on which this platform would be built.
Implementation: After the blueprint phase, it was time to start the implementation. Teams were set up to work following the SCRUM methodology. They developed the new application using a microservices architecture leveraging state of the art technologies such as Kafka, RXJava or AngularJS. A continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) infrastructure running with the platform ensured that new features could be tested and released rapidly.
In less than 6 months, the cloud platform for manufacturing solutions has been set up and a first service running on it has been delivered.
Our Client has now started its journey towards agility: With this platform they have the power to create new business models, globalize the development of their solutions and scale their business, all with transparent costs and efforts.
