A Next Generation Digital Backbone

LeasePlan is one of the world’s leading lease companies, with 1.9 million cars in more than 30 countries. Among its services are vehicle purchase, financing, fleet management, maintenance management, insurance, dealing with claims, and management of fuel and rentals.

In the scale of LeasePlan’s operation, an amazing digital customer experience is key. 
More and more organizations are therefore using new technologies to meet the expectations of their customers and to stay ahead of the competition.
LeasePlan strongly believes that there are huge opportunities for value creation in the Car-as-a-Service market. Unleashing that growth efficiently requires the implementation of a comprehensive digital business model, driven by their new IT architecture – called Next Generation Digital Architecture – to fuel seamless digital customer journeys spanning all Leaseplan’s products, services and processes.

A next generation digital experience called for a matching digital infrastructure, so YaWorks played a key role in the planning and rollout of an entire new global infrastructure that would meet Next Generation LeasePlan’s requirements.

LeasePlan has the unique ambition of becoming the world’s first full digital Car-as-a-Service company. To stay ahead of the curve, LeasePlan is committed to provide superior digital services at (lower) digital cost levels. To create a roadmap towards that goal, LeasePlan required a thorough understanding of their current IT landscape. 

The initial investigation into LeasePlan’s IT state of affairs showed that they were managing a very diverse and outdated technology stack, largely induced by a decentralised approach to its core IT services. As a result, the infrastructure couldn’t support LeasePlan’s pursuit of becoming a true digital car service integrator. 

LeasePlan asked YaWorks to step in and create a new digital backbone to better support their ambitions. 

More specific to LeasePlan, their digital strategy requires an infrastructure that offers resilience (a hard must when operating under a banking license), (cost)efficiency and – most importantly - agility. LeasePlan knew that failing to meet these prerequisites would result in serious challenges and delays in the roll out of their digital strategy, leading to the conception of the infrastructure transformation program. 

Increased flexibility
The strategy for a new digital backbone enables LeasePlan to further accelerate its growth and to make better use of its outstanding profitable opportunities. 

Because of the incremental and unpredictable nature of successfully implementing IT architecture, it’s invaluable to keep senior stakeholders engaged and aligned towards that goal.

YaWorks unites the capabilities to both create (architecture) and execute (design and build) IT strategy in vertical customer teams. As a prerequisite for migrating old to new, our customer teams represent expertise in both legacy and state of the art technology.  On top of their multidisciplinary nature, the teams are characterised by a common mindset and shared belief. Soft as it may sound, this team culture fosters collaboration and – as a result - velocity

In a very condensed timeframe, our architects investigated the state of LeasePlan’s infrastructure and supported LeasePlan with:

• A clear understanding of the current state of their IT infrastructure, including challenges, risks and areas of improvement. 
• A plan – with prioritized activities based on urgency, complexity and return on investment - to solve LeasePlan’s current challenges while building towards a Next Gen Infrastructure (with as little divestments as possible)
• A pragmatic execution model, based on executable projects and fast results, to transform their global infrastructure into a modern digital backbone. 
• Clear budgets, including navigation through approvals (from Private Equity). 
  Our business cases and narratives helped decision makers understand why the infrastructure transformation was a requirement for LeasePlan’s digital ambitions.

In short, we kickstarted the creation of a modern global digital backbone, leveraging standardised technology and an automate first principle, to create both the resilience and flexibility that LeasePlan required.

The digital IT foundation
LeasePlan can start building a platform that can be deployed worldwide from 1 centrally standardized environment. With a pragmatic plan, their digital 'car-as-a-service' strategy is supported by a solid digital backbone. This is the starting point for a backbone with almost endless scalability and access to the latest technologies.