Inter Cars is growing in the Microsoft cloud, introducing pioneering solutions to the market

20 października 2020

Inter Cars SA, the second largest distributor of automotive parts on the European market and the eighth largest worldwide, with a turnover of approx. 2.2 billion euro annually and nearly 30% market shares, has consistently been pursuing a strategy of migrating key elements of their business to the cloud. Their key system, SAP Hybris, has just been moved to Microsoft Azure. This is the first migration of this scale in Poland.

Over the years we have grown from a small, family-owned business to a large, complex enterprise- and I see the potential to continue to grow severalfold thanks to the digital transformation to the cloud

says Robert Kucharczyk, CIO of Inter Cars SA.

Inter Cars SA uses the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Cloud Platform to communicate with over 1000 car repair shops and 250 sales offices across Europe. Working in such a model is no longer limited to one device or location but allows for teamwork and cooperation between users working on different devices, apps, documents, and in different places. “Microsoft has been our trusted partner for many years. Thus, it’s natural that while searching for new solutions and exploring new technologies, we decided to use the services offered by this global provider

emphasizes Tomasz Skórski, HQ Digital Transformation Department Digital Products Development and Architecture Manager at Inter Cars.

The cloud model allows for the creation of new solutions to be added to the company’s portfolio and eliminates difficulties associated with managing product portfolio, its distribution and sales. In order to maximize flexibility, Inter Cars introduced a digital parts catalog. With the use of Microsoft Azure, the company designed an online catalog of 3.5 million automotive parts, used by more than 35 thousand customers at car repair shops every day on several European markets. The cloud also provides the possibility to update vehicle data and access new offers, current warehouse prices, and wholesale prices.

In order to remain competitive, companies adopt systems based on advanced analytics that combines knowledge and data from many parallel sources. This insights and information help to make optimal business decisions in real time. This same technology can be successfully used to solve key challenges such improving customer engagement and employee support, optimizing operating models, and transforming the product offer.

Another bold step into the cloud

The latest pioneering step in the Azure-based transformation of Inter Cars is the migration of SAP Hybris e-commerce environment, a key business system used by the company, to the cloud. This is the first such migration in Poland.

An important element of the migration was maintaining continuity of sales. We managed to do it 100%- that is, our customers experienced zero negative impact during this transition. We can safely say that it was the fastest project ever conducted in Inter Cars, which really only started a week before the maximum time limit for its implementation

says Katarzyna Wojczak, IT Competence Centre Manager at Inter Cars SA.

The implementation of solution has enabled Inter Cars employees to achieve full independence. They can now access everything they need to manage business applications straight from the cloud.

Previous experiences in terms of large-scale improvements have shown that the need to involve a large team of people led to the long implementation times. Today, business-critical changes can be realized in as little as 15 minutes, one of the major advantages of the direction the company has taken.

We have built our own infrastructure piece by piece, tailored specifically to our needs and expectations for this platform while full maintaining transparency of costs incurred

adds Katarzyna Wojczak.

The exponential development of digital commerce and the related part of the company has resulted in the need to significantly increase the availability of computing power necessary to maintain proper function. The decision to make this change was also dictated by the progressing digital transformation within the organization and the new working style of individual teams, as well as the need to implement rapid changes without incurring high “production” costs.

Microsoft Azure is a set of tools that you can use in any configuration to design a fully custom IT infrastructure that fits your needs. For Inter Cars a big priority was database environment- application systems that scale automatically. Of course, there is also the overarching requirement that is cybersecurity.

summarizes Jacek Zadrożny, Azure Business Architect at Microsoft.

Inter Cars initially planned to optimize cloud consumption in 3 years. As a result of this strategic partnership, this was already implemented at 20% capacity, reducing actual consumption below the base level. During the implementation, the system architecture was also overhauled, e.g. in terms of logging, performance monitoring, and database layers. Microsoft engineering team was responsible for these changes