Motability Operations integrates better to serve the UK’s disabled population
Motability
Motability Operations Ltd offers a wide range of cars, wheelchair accessible vehicles, scooters, and powered wheelchairs to meet customers’ disability needs. As part of its commitment to provide worry-free mobility, the company needed to modernize its lease management, finance, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems while integrating legacy systems and applications. To achieve these goals, the company implemented Red Hat JBoss Fuse with help from Tier 2 Consulting, a Red Hat Premier Middleware Partner. As a result, Motability Operations gained real-time data access, increased productivity, and improved employee engagement and retention.
Benefits:
- Built a flexible foundation for phased IT system modernization, including support for integration of legacy systems and applications
- Gained ability to provide reliable, real-time information to internal teams and third-party partners
- Improved developer productivity and engagement
Complex I.T. environment serves more than 600,000 customers
Motability Operations Ltd is the private company responsible for the finance, administration, and maintenance of the Motability Scheme under contract to the national charity established by the UK government in 1977. The Motability Scheme helps disabled people exchange mobility allowances to lease cars, scooters, or powered wheelchairs. Motability Operations is the UK’s largest car leasing company, with a fleet of more than 640,000 vehicles. As the company’s business has increased, the number and complexity of its IT systems has also grown. To continue to provide its customers with the best possible service, Motability Operations has increased its focus on data integrity between its systems. The company also saw a need for real-time updates between point of sale systems — typically used by third-party dealers and suppliers — and its back-end systems. Motability Operations sought to simplify its architecture by reducing the number of systems used and moving to one easier-to-manage platform that could support existing and future needs. To achieve this goal, the company launched its Apollo project in 2014 to overhaul existing leasing, finance, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. “Apollo aims to do away with the many, disparate legacy systems and consolidate all core processes and data onto a new shared platform,” said Charles Illingworth, development team lead at Motability Operations. The project’s success required thorough integration between new and legacy systems and applications. Motability Operations sought a more modern, reliable platform that would achieve this requirement while also ensuring flexibility for future product innovation. In addition, the company’s IT leaders wanted an integration solution that would be exciting for developers to quickly learn about and use, keeping productivity and employee satisfaction high.
A supported solution for Integration
Motability Operations chose Red Hat JBoss Fuse to consolidate its systems and implement a new, unified leasing, finance, and CRM back-end system. The lightweight, flexible platform delivers rapid integration of systems across the enterprise, while new, modular integration features and capabilities — such as an enterprise service bus (ESB) — improve data access. Deploying Red Hat JBoss Fuse also helped Motability Operations resolve maintenance issues from legacy applications that were running on unsupported platforms. “Being on a supportable platform is a requirement for us. Having Red Hat to fall back on is a big win,” said Illingworth. To successfully complete the Apollo project, Motability Operations took advantage of the expert support and consulting services available through Red Hat and its accredited partner network. The company worked closely with Tier 2 Consulting, a Red Hat Premier Middleware Partner, to create the initial architecture required for the project. This architecture was then reined to meet the company’s specific requirements. Tier 2 also helped keep the Apollo project on schedule, in addition to providing operational and developer support.
“It’s the biggest IT project we’ve done in a long, long time, probably ever. We have more than 150 people working on various aspects of the project,” said Illingworth. “With the ability to receive support from Red Hat and an active developer community, Red Hat JBoss Fuse was quite an easy choice to make for a solution that met our integration requirements.”
New platform brings internal and customer-facing improvements
Real-time data access
Previously, Motability Operations’ internal employees and staff at its third-party partners had to wait hours — or even overnight — to access updated customer information. With Red Hat JBoss Fuse, data access is dramatically faster. “Since we’ve implemented Red Hat JBoss Fuse, our people can reliably access customer information and other data as soon as it’s entered into the system,” said Illingworth. For example, as part of the leasing process, Motability Operations sends a request to a third party to generate key documents, such as customer letters, vehicle lease contracts, or partner invoices. Before the company implemented Red Hat JBoss Fuse, the process to request and create these documents was sometimes slow and cumbersome. Now, these documents are generated instantly.
Improved productivity and engagement
Using Red Hat JBoss Fuse has helped Motability Operations’ developers improve code and testing quality, resulting in fewer defects. “The speed of getting things working with Red Hat JBoss Fuse its well with the agile approach we use. You can get lots of systems and components talking to each other in the same sprint,” said Illingworth. In addition, connection between different types of endpoints — such as web services or legacy file systems — is now seamless and no longer requires writing many lines of code. As a result, integration is now completed in days or weeks, instead of months. “We can get end-to-end integrations up and running quickly,” said Ian Page, senior middleware consultant with Tier 2 Consulting. “And there’s nothing like quick results to keep engineers engaged.” Developers have also quickly become familiar with the new technology and enjoy working with it. “Red Hat JBoss Fuse has been good for retaining and attracting talent. When we’re advertising for developers, people who interview are excited about the technology and want to learn more,” said Illingworth.
Easier system integration
Using Red Hat JBoss Fuse not only helps Motability Operations easily integrate legacy systems with the new IT environment but also newer, more strategic systems. As a result, the company can complete IT system modernization in planned phases to maintain reliability and stability while adopting improved technology and expanding to offer new services to customers.
Plans for future innovation
Outside of the company’s IT department, other business units within Motability Operations are also seeing the performance benefits from real-time updates and other capabilities of Red Hat JBoss Fuse. “It’s not uncommon to have employees ask, ‘Can’t Red Hat JBoss Fuse handle that?’ during requirement gathering meetings with our business users and stakeholders,” said Illingworth. Motability Operations plans to expand its use of Red Hat JBoss Fuse. During the rest of the Apollo project, which is planned to continue for several more years, developers will replace or retire all of the company’s legacy applications and integrations. In addition, the company will look to integrate these new systems with its third-party partners. Motability Operations is also planning to create more ways to interact with customers online and deliver real-time account information, as well as more options for web self-service, using the features and capabilities of Red Hat JBoss Fuse.
About Motability Operations
Since 1978, Motability Operations has provided a wide range of affordable vehicles to meet its customers’ different disability needs. Today, Motability Operations assists more than 640,000 disabled people in the UK.
