Think-it first contributed to BMW Group’s value chain by producing driver-centric added value and unlocking new product initiatives. Our first use-case was supporting AWS cloud adoption within the BMW Group by building an end-to-end data-driven use case delivering an intelligent personal driver assistant that served as a boilerplate for other use cases moving forward.

Our PoC was a data architecture that reliably ingested data and extracted insights to analyze driver behavior, delivered in a mobile-first UI. This could lead to increasing road safety, developing usage-based pricing, and offering tailored consumer services.

The system followed a 100% cloud native architecture optimized for large scale networks and big data volumes. We ensured scalability through an extensive use of serverless architecture coupled with automated deployment and delivery with a combination of CodePipeline, Terraform, and CloudFormation. Additionally, the system was responsible for performing data gathering, analysis, modeling, and visualization using state of the art machine learning on Sagemaker.

The collaboration was a success and met all its objectives. As BMW Group's cloud adoption increased, the partnership was deepened in order to further scale the utilization of the BMW Cloud Data Hub.

The BMW Group’s cloud adoption and creation of the Cloud Data Hub (CDH) on Amazon Web Service (AWS) was a huge step forward from the previous data lake, which posed organizational bottlenecks that slowed down innovation. With massive amounts of data available, The BMW group needed to make all that data available through one single platform.

To better manage this data, the notion of “data providers” and “data consumers” was introduced to increase both the autonomy and agility of its software engineering teams. Data providers ingest and transform data. Data consumers could then leverage data for their use cases. Both providers and consumers could use these services in their own accounts, and only share well-defined interfaces that could be controlled by a central API, helping prevent bottlenecks. 

How can the Think-it team help manage the digital transformation into the cloud on an enterprise level, allowing more data providers and consumers to effectively onboard on the CDH and leverage it?  We automated the onboarding and cloud configuration for new data consumers within the CDH to allow users without cloud expertise to leverage the platform and ensure scaling to enterprise level.

The Think-it team had the goal of implementing a seamless and automated onboarding process for data consumers on the cloud infrastructure. This meant: automate the bootstrapping and setup of new cloud accounts and resources, automate setup of tools (EMR) for big data processing and analysis, enable data access and consumption through a simple and intuitive UI, and infrastructured deployment via Terraform & CDK.

The Data Portal front end application served as a data explorer to enhance the productivity of data analysts, data scientists, and engineers by offering a “popularity index” based on data usage patterns as well as  clearly displaying data resources.

As Think-it played its part with other contributors, BMW Group saw more integration of users and a thriving ecosystem of participants in the CDH. This opened opportunities to start building data-driven use-cases (while still contributing to the evolution of the CDH) on top of the data architecture. And one particularly innovative and unique use case in the competitive environment emerged around Digital Tyre Diagnosis to provide the driver with comprehensive information about the condition of the vehicle's tyres.

Now that we’ve unleashed the data within BMW group, how can we build unique services on top of that data?

The BMW Group had the goal to provide drivers with early insights about their tire conditions. As part of the enhanced My BMW App experience, they wanted to offer customers more comprehensive information about aspects such as pressure loss or tire wear — and connect them with the right maintenance support at the right time.

The BMW team needed the right external support to showcase the power of a cloud-based infrastructure to fuel data-driven use cases that deliver superior user experiences — and build a robust and reliable system that can handle the roll-out across multiple geographies.

The Think-it team set out to build a Proof of Concept for scalable back-end cloud infrastructure for a tyre inflation pressure loss detection system - resulting in an end-to-end solution notifying customers of tyre conditions such as pressure loss and tire wear and connecting them with the right opportunity to buy their next set of wheels at the right time.

GOAL: Build a data-driven PoC for predictive tyre diagnosis and maintenance.

We collaborated with BMW to build the Proof-of-Concept providing intelligent services on top of their tyre business — improving customer experience through the My BMW app by notifying them ahead of time about tyre maintenance opportunities.

This approach boosted customer insights and satisfaction — while also empowering BMW’s technical teams with a powerful and efficient platform to easily retrieve, explore, and analyze relevant data in order to explore new innovation potential on top of the PoC.

BMW Group is a pioneer when it comes to sovereign data exchange and one of the main drivers behind the Catena-X data ecosystem as well as the Mobility Data Space.  The Mobility Data Space (MDS) is a European data space that launched in January 2022 with 80 datasets provided by around 200 companies that seek to explore first use cases in the mobility sector offering “access to real-time traffic data and sensitive mobility data beyond their secure exchange” linking data platforms to each other.

With Catena-X, the automotive industry of the future uses a trustworthy, collaborative, open and secure data ecosystem. All players are networked in end-to-end value chains, in which all partners are on an equal ground, have sovereign control over their data and no lock-in effects occur, which provides a sustainable solution for the digitalization of supply chains, especially for medium-sized and small companies, and supports the cooperation and collaboration of market participants and competitors.

The BMW Group wanted to give business users insights into available data and conditions as well as create data pipelines and contract offers for data being exchanged with external organizations. They wanted a centralized place to enable non-technical users to exchange data with external organizations. There was no alternative tool available, and the current solution was human-driven manual work.

Think-it conducted research with stakeholders across 6 different departments within BMW Group to fully understand the business needs. We built a powerful Data Portal plug-in that creates a unified view of all data assets. Furthermore, as new use cases are created, this plugin is automatically deployed inside their familiar environment.

Business users inside BMW Group now have a single source of truth to manage data that is being provided and consumed without needing to access another new tool. The dashboard is aggregated across multiple legal entities with specified roles and accountabilities with metrics displayed in multiple levels of granularity.

Concretely, Think-it enabled:

• A single source of truth across BMW Group.
• An overview of data that is provided and consumed.
• Aggregate multiple legal entities (e.g., BMW Holding, BMW A.G., etc.)
• Foresight into contract agreements closure, so that legal and dealers can follow-up with new negotiations.
• Defining resources in multiple EDC Connector instances, and technical and business operators to be able to see the status of their connectors.