SMH Fleet are a fleet management organisation, now a subsidiary of used car brand Cazoo. They are experts in providing vehicle management and ancillary services to car manufacturers, contract hire and leasing companies, motor dealers and major fleet operators.

The challenge

One of their market differentiators is their internal software platform that manages operations and provides information and business intelligence to their customers. Whilst the system was robust, it had developed and evolved over many years without much planning.

As a result, it had many challenges that needed to be addressed – such as scalability, performance and maintainability issues.

In addition, SMH had further challenges:

• Internal capacity was insufficient to manage all the changes
• The software product needed to be transitioned to a cloud platform
• The security risk of remaining on an outdated and unsupported platform

SMH Fleet required a trusted partner who could support their existing team and pick up the sometimes onerous day-to-day sprints, whilst also supporting architectural design of their future solution, ensuring they remained secure at all times.

The solution

FSP deployed a flexible team of four to support SMH Fleet, initially biased towards architectural skills – supporting different aspects of their transformation. In addition, a Lead Developer worked with them to establish appropriate software development practices – an area of weakness.

Working remotely, our team initially established an architectural pattern to support SMH Fleet with a move of their data storage layer, using Azure SQL and Data Lake. Following this, we shifted the team in consultation with SMH, to one with a stronger development focus, picking up bugs in the existing platform (written on ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebForms). At this point the balance shifted to three developers and one architect overseeing.

This has been extremely successful, helping SMH to gain a far higher velocity of change.

THE BENEFITS

• Achieved 30% more throughput through the SMH Fleet development team
• Supported SMH staff in focusing on key value-add activities
• Accelerated the architecture of a new platform; helping SMH to take advantage of Azure cloud technologies for the first time
• Enabled SMH to accelerate development velocity following their acquisition by Cazoo – a key area for focus