BMW partnered with Gloster to transform its earlier static, on-premises IT infrastructure into a dynamic, cloud-based system that now underpins its global production logistics. Over a multi-year transformation journey, Gloster designed a cloud-native, microservice-based architecture to act as a scalable gateway between established on-premises systems and modern cloud platforms.
The system significantly reduces deployment time, enhances agility, and ensures 24/7 availability for business-critical operations. Today, it powers Bill of Materials (BOM) calculations for every BMW production line worldwide, supporting Just-in-Time manufacturing across all brands and geographies.
Gloster’s integrated DevOps model and end-to-end lifecycle management ensure business continuity and operational resilience throughout the transition.
BMW, founded in 1913 and globally recognized for innovation in automotive engineering, leads the industry in premium electric mobility and production efficiency. With factories spanning Europe, Asia, and North America, BMW depends on real-time digital systems to orchestrate highly synchronized manufacturing and supply chain processes.
The system developed by Gloster is one of BMW’s most critical IT systems, supporting demand calculations and logistics for short, medium, and long-term production planning across all global BMW Group brands, including Mini and Rolls-Royce.
BMW faced significant challenges with its existing system:
- Prior static, on-premises IT infrastructure had reached its natural limits, struggling to support the scale and adaptability required for increasingly complex logistics requirements
- Lack of integration with cloud-native technologies
- High cost and risk of downtime, with factory-level delays potentially costing millions per day
- Slow feature delivery and brittle infrastructure
Gloster was selected through a competitive five-year tender to implement and operate the DevOps model supporting BMW's global production logistics. While the modernisation effort involved multiple partners, Gloster played a central role as the DevOps provider—driving CI/CD automation, platform reliability, and agile delivery across a complex, distributed architecture.
Gloster adopted a phased, risk-conscious transformation strategy grounded in Agile, DevOps, and cloud engineering best practices.
Key elements:
1. Microservice Ecosystem (60+ services)
A modular architecture enabled independent development, testing, and deployment of both core and supporting services. This parallelised workflows and improved system resilience.
2. Cloud Migration
To support global scalability and high availability, BMW required a modern cloud-native architecture. Gloster delivered this using infrastructure-as-code and managed services (e.g., cloud databases, caching layers), dramatically reducing provisioning time and operational overhead.
3. CI/CD and Blue/Green Deployment
Automated CI/CD pipelines and blue/green deployment models reduced release time from 5 hours to under 5 minutes. This enabled bi-weekly production deployments—replacing BMW’s quarterly release cadence and better aligning with evolving business priorities.
4. Data Handling at Scale
Gloster engineered nightly processing of over 500 GB of structured production data, transforming and storing it in Apache Solr for high-performance analytics and delivery. More than 40 factories receive updated demand data daily, supporting Just-in-Time manufacturing precision.
5. DevOps Integration Model
Gloster serves as the DevOps Provider within BMW’s organizational matrix, integrating the outputs of multiple Scrum teams, maintaining test coverage, and coordinating production go-lives. This central DevOps hub ensures continuous delivery, operational visibility, and accountability across the release pipeline.
The project's success hinged on people as much as technology:
- Established a strong "ownership mindset" across all teams—Hungarian, German, Portuguese
- Overcame initial hesitation by demonstrating reliability and clear role distribution
- On-site meetings and open collaboration transformed perceptions from vendor to equal partner
- Night shifts and 24/7 ops coverage were framed as team-building and career growth opportunities
Over successive sprints and releases, the teams collectively refined not only the technical stack but also their collaboration model—transforming early coordination challenges into a foundation of mutual trust and operational excellence.
Business Continuity Ensured: We built and validated a full shadow system before switching production traffic, minimizing risk and guaranteeing uptime.
Efficiency Gains:
- Deployment time cut from 5 hours to under 5 minutes
- Automated demand forecasting and material calculation updated nightly for 40+ factories
- Reduced failure rates due to proactive monitoring and automated validation
The transition empowered BMW’s teams with direct control over infrastructure scaling, instant rollback capabilities, and resource optimization, ensuring resilience and flexibility across a globally distributed production environment.
Partnership Evolution:
Gloster is now a recognized DevOps leader within BMW, entrusted with future-facing initiatives. The team evolved from feature developers to full lifecycle custodians of a globally critical production system.
Differentiators:
- Weekly deployment cycles
- Integrated delivery from multi-national Scrum teams
- Ownership of incident resolution and process discipline
BMW and Gloster will continue enhancing the system to support future initiatives, as Gloster has been awarded a 5-year contract due to their outstanding performance and reliability:
- AI/ML Optimization: Internal LLM-hosting and process analytics to optimize demand prediction
- Ecosystem Integration: Expansion to additional BMW divisions and supplier interfaces
- Advanced Observability: Evolution of alerting and diagnostic telemetry
