Centralizing digital deployment for an innovative automotive company

Introduction

Cognizant Netcentric was tasked with supporting a global automotive company in its leap to a new marketing and ecommerce platform. With a long history and legacy of innovation, the organization’s priority was to unify a complex and sometimes disjointed ecosystem and streamline the Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) platform for all European operations.

To tailor an optimized solution with continuous integration & continuous delivery (CICD), Cognizant Netcentric delivered several DevOps improvements. These improvements reduced costs and improved the efficiency of infrastructure, teams, and processes in the long run. With this solution, the company can commit to on-demand releases with reduced time to market, reduced infrastructure costs going forward in a scaled-up, and agile delivery environment.

Challenge

The client identified several pain points with their existing ecosystem that were preventing them from delivering content to customers at speed and scale and adapting to industry changes. The team was faced with fractured processes resulting from siloed teams, infrastructure that was costly to maintain, and manual testing. These all led to slow time-to-market for new components and assets.

Ultimately, our challenge was to implement a solution that would help streamline and optimize the client’s AEM platform, which would enable them to react and deliver new content to consumers quickly. This included implementing a strong foundation through an AEM server definition, an automated integration and deployment pipeline, as well as a platform monitoring dashboard.

Approach

From beginning to end, Cognizant Netcentric worked closely with the client team to ensure all parties had clear context and were actively involved in the strategic design of the solution. This included holding discovery workshops and planning a bedding-in period to follow through with adoption. We also documented the solution thoroughly to ensure a clean, step-by-step progression in the development, and ran a pilot to iterate on the product through the pipeline before rolling out the full solution.

Implementation

In creating a bespoke solution tailored to the client’s needs, Cognizant Netcentric built out 3 main improvements. The first was a one-click AEM Server Definition which would allow the client to install, update, and reset instances with one command. The second was an Automated Integration & Deployment Pipeline that could build and deploy both AEM and non-AEM packages. Finally, we also built a monitoring dashboard function to provide centralized real-time information on the build and platform status to stakeholders.

Everything was deployed on existing infrastructure and cloud-enabled, streamlining the development and maintenance of the platform. In total, 3 foundation products were implemented with CICD and over 20 products were onboarded onto the pipeline.

Working with a product-driven organization and autonomous development teams, we took steps to prioritize transparency and active collaboration throughout our partnership.

Results & Key Benefits

The outcome for our client was a state-of-the-art, newly implemented, automated Dev Sec Ops pipeline which our client called “pure automation magic”. This unified solution included an intuitive desktop build for AEM, a Dispatcher with targeted patches, and support for the client and their supplier licenses. We also provided an Automated Deployment Pipeline with a Build Dashboard to decrease release efforts while increasing performance quality.

This unified solution unlocked a number of key business benefits for our client:

• 5x increase in efficiency and time-to-market for their products
• The ability to ‘release on demand’ in an agile delivery environment
• Optimized development and a reduction in manual processes, thanks to the automated pipeline
• Interdepartmental transparency through the use of the Dashboard. This allowed developers to improve the sequencing of development flows and protect the time of their product teams
• Streamlining and fortifying the testing process with improved coverage and static analysis to enable developers to react in real time
• Enhanced DevOps capabilities thanks to a centrally managed CI pipeline, enabling e-captures and automating build, deploy, and test capabilities which were rolled out across all teams

This project not only transformed our client’s delivery pipeline, but also sparked a transformation in their development culture and workflows, improving agility and connection between teams. Co-created by Netcentric and our client, we’re proud to say our solution has been adopted by this leading automotive firm’s global approach to pipeline creation and implementation. This transformation equips the organization with the ability to leverage AEM in delivering content with speed and scale, cementing their position as a leading innovator not just in automotives, but in customer experience too.