Over the last two years, BearingPoint have supported Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) to design and deliver their first connected cars. No templates exist for designing and delivering a connected car, especially those with embedded technology so BearingPoint provided a diverse team with depth and breadth of both management and technology consulting expertise to address many known and unknown challenges of launching innovative digital products and services.
The joint JLR and BearingPoint team successfully launched the connected car and a suite of digital products including automatic emergency call functionality that calls the emergency services and sends the vehicle’s location; breakdown call that contacts the roadside assistance provider and sends the vehicle health and location data of the car; a smartphone app with vehicle information such as where it is parked, how much fuel remains, what journeys have been taken, the car’s security status, and a stolen vehicle tracker.
BearingPoint developed assets that were key building blocks for the solution design. The programme governance, the complex architecture, the end-to-end customer experience and processes, the test strategy and the customer support and operations model.
From a technical perspective, they mapped the physical messages exchanged by the car and the cloud to the logical business services they represented and built test rigs to enable validation and testing of message flows for different use cases and technical scenarios. They also took responsibility for designing the rules engine that determines the configuration of services on a vehicle and manage the configuration that controls how live vehicles behave depending on which market they are in, what subscriptions have been purchased, what capabilities the vehicle has and what legislation is applicable.
BearingPoint also developed the approach for a market launch which required project and change management, business model development, asset and process localisation, service provider selection, contracting and technical integration, development of terms and conditions and data privacy policies, in market testing, dealer training, customer support training and reporting.
They have so far supported the implementation into 3 markets with 2 different business models and 7 service providers. The coming year sees the team continue to support the launch of new features and an accelerated rollout across additional markets.
A BearingPoint consultant supported the first handover to a customer and witnessed the delight as he experienced the connected services for the first time. Early indications show very positive feedback from dealers and customers and independent recognition by analysts on the usability and design of the solution.
Every consultant involved says this is the most challenging, innovative and exciting project that they have worked on. It is unusual to have the privilege of being involved in the full lifecycle of taking such a pioneering technology to market and see it in the hands of real customers.