Modernizing Volkswagen's Critical Parts Planning System on AWS

About the Customer

Volkswagen AG is a multinational automotive manufacturer headquartered in Wolfsburg, Germany. It designs, manufactures, and distributes passenger and commercial vehicles and offers related services, including financing, leasing and fleet management.

Customer Challenge

Volkswagen's LM-TAB system is critical for managing data used in planning product development and production across all its brands. However, the system was running on an aging AS400 mainframe using an IMS hierarchical database. This legacy architecture posed several challenges:

• The system was inflexible to changing business needs and difficult to maintain
• Mainframe costs were high and scaling was problematic
• Integration with modern systems was complex
• The user experience was outdated, relying on terminal screens

Without modernization, these issues posed risks to the efficiency of Volkswagen's core planning processes and its ability to remain agile in a fast-moving industry.

Partner Solution

Trask Solutions, an AWS Advanced Services Partner with deep expertise in both mainframe and cloud technologies, has lead the effort to modernize LM-TAB and migrate it to AWS. The solution involves:

• Re-architecting LM-TAB as a microservices-based application, using Angular for a modern web UI, .NET and Python for the backend services
• Using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) with AWS Fargate to run the application microservices in serverless containers
• Deploying infrastructure as code using AWS CloudFormation and Terraform
• Leveraging AWS Lambda for implementing serverless business logic and data transformations
• Migrating from the IMS hierarchical database to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL using the AWS Database Migration Service
• Storing static web assets and backups in Amazon S3
• Enabling secure, managed API access to backend services with Amazon API Gateway
• Monitoring application health and collecting logs and metrics using Amazon CloudWatch
• Analyzing and debugging distributed services with AWS X-Ray
• Ensuring network security and isolation with Amazon VPC and protecting against common web exploits with AWS WAF
• Automating data backup and restoration with AWS Backup
• Managing source control with AWS CodeCommit and automating deployments with AWS CodeDeploy
• Applying agile delivery practices including prototyping, domain modeling, and comprehensive testing to manage the complexity

The solution has been delivered in phases - from initial order clarification and design, through development and testing, to final go-live and hypercare.

Results and Benefits

The modernized LM-TAB system on AWS is delivering significant benefits to Volkswagen:

• Improved user experience and efficiency through a modern web UI and integrated functionality
• Increased agility and faster time-to-market for changes and new features  
• 40%+ reduction in infrastructure costs by moving off mainframe to native cloud services
• Enhanced scalability and resilience from AWS's global infrastructure and managed services
• Better security posture with VPC isolation, encryption, WAF protection, and automated backups
• Streamlined operations with infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and centralized monitoring and logging
• Simplified IT landscape by consolidating systems and retiring legacy mainframe hardware/software as well as not relying on retiring AS400 engineers

The new cloud-native architecture sets Volkswagen up for future innovation, while the success of the project has laid a template for modernizing other legacy systems.

About the Partner

Trask Solutions is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner with deep expertise in legacy modernization and cloud native development. Trask has a 20-year track record of delivering complex transformation projects for enterprise clients across automotive, financial services, and other industries.