Customer Story
Precisely Data Integration Services Enable BMW Group to Build Trust in Data
Precisely supports BMW Group in achieving near real-time data replication
1916
year founded
€150bn
in revenue
150,000
employees
Overview
To maintain the high standards for which the BMW Group is renowned and to address contemporary requirements, BMW Group needed to update its IT system infrastructure, particularly within its mainframe environment.
Challenge
For decades, BMW Group has been operating with a legacy mainframe environment that supports over 600 applications across various functions, such as research and development, logistics processes, production, sales, and post-sales. Just as varied as the departments relying on these mainframe applications was the data being generated. Some of the departments used Db2 whereas others relied on VSAM files of IMS databases, creating complex data governance processes and costly maintenance. With hundreds of applications relying on the mainframe, it became a complex web of thousands of interfaces, dependencies, and intricate database logic.
These complexities made mainframe maintenance extremely difficult. In addition to maintenance, BMW Group was concerned about the impact of a large-scale migration being unable to support all the applications at once, and in turn disrupting business. As a result, a phased approach was introduced to support a long-term migration and short-term modernization.
Michael Huhn, Project Lead, Digital Decoupling at BMW Group explained that their mainframe initiative is about providing solutions that help the applications migrate while also providing transition steps and a migration path for the data pipeline. The goal for BMW Group is to move data out of the mainframe and simplify the data pipeline for end users while improving the overall data strategy.
Part of this data strategy was to equip users with access to the data they needed for applications as they modernized. Therefore, the goal was to develop a self-service portal that would enable data pipelines to be easily built and monitored, allowing operations to continue as usual.
Industry
Automotive
Company Overview
- Headquartered in Munich, Germany
- Founded in 1916
- Over 2.4 million premium vehicles produced a year
- €150 billion in revenue
- 150,000 employees globally
Solution
Solution
The goal for BMW Group was to find an integrated solution that supported Confluent Kafka and could move data out of the mainframe while minimizing time, cost, and most importantly, service disruptions.
BMW Group turned to the Precisely Data Integrity Suite for its Data Integration Services, which provides near real-time and ensures that databases are in-sync for reporting, analytics, and data warehousing. The Data Integration Service fits BMW Group’s needs as it offers sources like Db2, VSAM, and IMS, but also target technologies in the cloud and standard integration platforms like Confluent Kafka.
According to Jacques Hugo, Solutions Architect, Mainframe Migration Initiative, BMW Group, the Data Integration Service is helping BMW Group overcome the challenge of having a seamless integrated solution in its global mainframe landscape, ensuring that the team is able to easily operate and maintain what’s already in place, including a solution that aligns with BMW Group’s compliance, governance, and IT requirements. By implementing data replication, the team can create data pipelines from sources to distributed targets, ensuring that each application use case can be supported in their migration paths. By leveraging this solution, the team captures changes and existing data from Db2 and brings it to Kafka. This establishes continuous data replication, which ensures that any changes to the source data is reflected in the target database in near real-time, facilitating application development through a phased approach.
With this process in place, end users can leverage the self-service portal, which automates the creation of data pipelines. This user-friendly portal allows teams within the organization to quickly select and validate source data with confidence to trust that migrations are executed efficiently and accurately.
Outcome
BMW Group’s complex IT environment has been replaced with simplicity. The key to success is not only a seamless implementation process, but the trust that the data pipelines have instilled in users across the organization. Thanks to the Data Integration Service, BMW Group’s enhanced performance efficiency with near real-time has an average end-to-end time of 250mms per record. Additionally, Precisely manages tables with billions of rows and supports data loads to Kafka at over a million records per minute.
The fully automated onboarding process through the Self-Service Portal has achieved zero reported incidents since going live and enables BMW Group to quickly create data pipelines, both of which are resulting in high user satisfaction. The journey has only just begun, but in this process, BMW Group has successfully developed a highly efficient and reliable data environment that sustains the organization’s operational excellence and customer-centric focus.
BMW Group’s phased approach to mainframe modernization earned the company the 2024 Best in Business Impact Data Integrity Award.
Data Integration
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