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RapDev Case Study

A Vastly Improved Service Management Experience

RapDev brings automated change management and customer self-service portals to TomTom.
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RapDev’s integrations streamlined this consumer electronics company’s approval process for faster deployment and DORA metric tracking.

TomTom is an innovative location technology and consumer electronics company based in Amsterdam. They partner with consumers, corporations, and governments around the world.

TomTom is the world’s leading independent geolocation technology specialist. Since 1991, the company’s maps, digital cockpit solutions, navigation software, and traffic data have helped people and organizations make their way around the world. TomTom has over 30 offices in cities worldwide and a growing workforce generating over $500 million in revenue.

4.5 K

employees

34 offices

4 continents

$539 M

2021 revenue

32 years

in business

The Challenge

Faster Deployment and DORA Metric Visibility

As technology changes, so does how we navigate neighborhoods, cities, countries, and the globe. As a result, location data doesn’t just need to be accurate; it needs to shift in real-time to reflect traffic, points of interest, and more.

Developers in this field must quickly deploy software changes to bring the most up-to-date information to their users. And, because navigation and mapping are data-driven, consumers and enterprises require on-demand access to their data and records.

Deploying software changes faster depends upon automation. Manual processes in the continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline can slow the deployment process considerably. Therefore, companies who want to develop software in a cutting-edge manner must embrace automation across the software development and delivery processes.

For the 160 development teams responsible for CI/CD pipelines at TomTom, manually approving emergency changes, QAs, and managing tickets become a bottleneck in the release process.

The team used a set of tools and approaches, including:

  • Jira
  • Slack
  • PagerDuty
  • Accenture

These were meant to help teams manage tickets, improve team communication, and automate tasks, but ultimately, leadership found that some tools sat dormant while others didn’t offer them the full functionality developers were looking for.

In addition to their need for faster deployment, TomTom’s engineering leadership lacked the infrastructure necessary to track DORA metrics. Without this, the team had no baseline data for things like lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore (MTTR), and change fail percentage.

While the team struggled to track these metrics internally, they also juggled similar requests from clients. TomTom’s customers needed access to baseline data, availability reports, and performance management tools to help them use the company’s products efficiently. The absence of self-management tools negatively impacted customer satisfaction.

The Results
Improve Quality
Improve production code quality by shifting from manual testing to automated testing.
Reduce Time
Reduce the time it takes to deploy code without negatively impacting compliance or risk mitigation.
Co-deploy Implementations
Co-deploy a ServiceNow implementation that continues to drive agility.
Eliminate Delays
Eliminate delays from CAB meetings.

Better Visibility, Faster Deployment, and Happier Customers

Partnering with RapDev enabled TomTom to:

  • Onboard Multiple Teams
  • Onboard nearly 40 teams to the new DevOps tools and processes.
  • Reduce Time
  • Reduce the time required for change approvals with one-touch approvals for QAs & emergency changes.
  • Automate Change Management
  • Automate the change management process to allow for faster software deployment.
  • Create Customer Portals
  • Launch self-service portals for clients to access reports, records, and other performance metrics.
  • Track DORA Metrics
  • Deploy ServiceNow’s DevOps module to track DORA metrics across 9000 code repositories.

After deploying the ServiceNow DevOps module and change management integrations, TomTom’s development team has the visibility they need to make more informed decisions across the organization and integrations to automate multiple processes across the CI/CD pipeline.

“We built out a configuration with some automation,” said Scott Mitchell, head of IT service management at TomTom. “The tools are quite powerful, but we didn’t want to get too tricky too fast. We’re seeing now that we can measure service levels, the basic ones for internal problem management, our SLAs, and a lot of the things we used to do manually.”

RapDev’s deployment enabled TomTom to get the most value from their ServiceNow module. In addition, through their work with RapDev, TomTom plans to complete the DevOps module rollout for the remainder of their development teams and initiate an enterprise-wide rollout, which will further boost the value on their ServiceNow investment and help drive TomTom’s future innovation.

Not only is TomTom pleased with the increased deployment speed and frequency, but they’re also seeing greater customer satisfaction with the launch of their customer self-service portals. Now, customers can access a comprehensive IT service management platform with the metrics they need to adapt and innovate in their organizations.  

“For anything that we can’t handle or is a huge piece of work,” Mitchell said, “RapDev will be our provider of choice. Traditional problems you have with vendors around controlling scope, scope creep, and checking additional charges — stuff like that — it’s never been like that with RapDev. It’s always been a good relationship. That’s part of why we extended our contract for several phases of more support.”

What's Next

ServiceNow Expansion Opportunities

With ServiceNow’s value proven, TomTom is now looking to implement the platform across its entire organization, helping them bring automation, visibility, and data-driven decision-making in development processes to the whole company. TomTom is always looking for new ways to help users navigate the world, and RapDev is helping them stay one step ahead of the competition.

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