Introduction

The automotive industry is undergoing a period of unprecedented change, with disruptive technologies such as autonomous driving, electric vehicles and connected cars transforming the landscape. The effects of a complex IT landscape, diverse technologies, multiple service vendors and knowledge siloes in teams are already taking their toll on efficiency, cost and uptime. This whitepaper discusses how automotive companies can streamline their IT operations by using tools that enable business flow observability, embedded with AI/ML and automation capabilities. Benefits of these technologies include increased uptime, reduced issue resolution time and of course, streamlined business and IT collaboration.

Typical challenges in the manufacturing industry

• Lack of real-time tracking
• Complex IT landscape, systems and technologies
• Large volume of legacy applications
• Reactive actions due to lack of business context
• Poor quality of knowledge management and documentation
• Lack of documented business processes and customizations
• Multiple vendors supporting infrastructure, apps, DC, etc.
• Lack of integrated IT and business governance
• Lack of process and change documentation (For example L1, L1.5, L2, L3 and L4 processes, finance, asset hierarchy, etc.)

Benefits of leveraging business flow observability tools and AI/ML automation capabilities in operation management within the automotive industry

• Improved visibility into application workflows
• Reduced mean-time-to-resolution and enhanced predictability and reliability of IT operations
• Real-time process performance visualization
• Hierarchical and impact drilldowns for an integrated view on complexity historical and predictive analytics to enable better architecting
• Customizable persona-based dashboards for better team accountability
• Transparency in performance statistics both for business and IT
• Improved customer experiences

Conclusion

The automation capabilities and deployment of business flow observability tools with ML and AI in the automotive industry can lead to multiple benefits and will increase in value with time. We have observed the following for our clients who have adopted business flow observability tools:

• Improved mean-time-to-identify and remediated incidents by up to 60% with real-time process performance visualization
• Reduced mean-time-to-repair and improved stability due to linking application observability to real-time business metrics
• Proactive management by detecting system anomalies before they affect the business or customers
• Reduced cost by providing a cockpit view and a central consolidation point for events
• Assistance with rearchitecting apps and system(s) by identification of areas that are ripe for re-engineering or automation

This start-small approach is important as many enterprises already have as many as five to ten existing monitoring tools and there might be some reluctance to add more, fearing further complexity. In our experience, we have seen organizations with a long-term strategy of intelligent IT operations realize many other long-term benefits such as reduced total cost of operation and better team collaboration