The Challenge: The Need for Speed (to Market)

Many markets, representing millions of potential customers, have committed to banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Others have made voluntary arrangements to support the adoption of electric vehicles soon. This trend underscores the value and need for quick, efficient, and sustainable EV manufacturing—a challenge this company has proudly embraced.

Leadership committed to the electric vehicle project with a goal of opening production facilities in Shanghai, China. Seeing the need to get up and running quickly and ensure optimal collaboration between the Shanghai manufacturing teams and existing UK vehicle teams, establishing a solid Lean-Agile practice became a priority. 

But there were some formidable challenges to overcome:

• Most members of the engineering and manufacturing teams in Shanghai were totally new to Agile, although familiar with Lean Manufacturing methods and concepts. So, they are learning a new way of working while simultaneously setting up new facilities, melding as a team, and taking on a new, high-priority project.
• Multinational distributed teams can face barriers because of language and cultural differences, as well as the logistical issues caused by widely spaced time zones—there is only a three-hour window when teams in the UK and China are both working.

The company originally brought in an Agile Transformation vendor that failed to mesh effectively with the teams and didn’t make genuine progress. To reset the initiative, they brought in Cprime… and we have guided the Shanghai teams to perform “Above and Beyond” expectations.

The Solution: Expert Training and Coaching that Guides New Agile Teams to Scaled Success

Cprime Agile Coaches began working with the Shanghai teams in coordination with the company’s Lead Agile Coach in London. Success was a multi-step process.

Initial Planning

Donald Ng, the Lead Agile Coach heading up the engagement for Cprime, worked directly with the UK team and all the Cprime coaches working onsite and remotely to set up both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for collaboration on a cadence that fit everyone’s schedules and supported steady progress. 

Rather than attempting to take on everything at once, the plan was to start with a team of seven coaches working with about 60 team members. As the engagement progressed beyond the fundamentals, Cprime brought in two additional coaches to meet the program’s needs over the next three months. The teams were further organized into nineteen “squads” across three coaching groups as internal roles matured. 

Filling Necessary Agile Roles

At the start, the Cprime Agile Coaches took on the responsibilities of Scrum Master for the teams, besides coaching and training. Donald has worked closely with the client team to facilitate the hiring and training processes so internal associates could fill those roles as quickly as possible. 

Now, all the teams’ Scrum Masters and Product Owners are well-qualified internal team members and the Cprime coaches can focus wholly on coaching and training the teams for success. The three coaching groups now comprise two or three Cprime coaches, six internal Product Owners, and three Scrum Masters from six different squads.

Agile Training

To ground the Shanghai teams in the fundamentals of Agile and how to apply them in the manufacturing environment, the coaches facilitated several training courses over four months. These included:

• Twelve core module courses covering three topics (Agile Mindset, Introduction to Scrum, and the client’s unique framework for scaling Agility)
• Fifteen bite-size learning sessions on various topics developed to fill specific gaps, including Jira and Confluence fundamentals, Innovations Stories Sharing, and Kanban fundamentals.
• Seven role-based sessions to train and support new Scrum Masters and Product Owners. 

Additionally, a Leadership Training program is slated to begin to broaden organizational support for the growing Agile practice.

Ongoing Stabilization and Scaling

As the Agile practice develops and scales, stabilization is required to ensure the organization maintains continuous improvement and reaps all the benefits of Agility. The core stabilizing factor is the Agile Community of Practice (CoP).

CoPs are groups of people organized around a specific technical or business domain. A healthy CoP actively focuses on professional networking, personal relationships, shared knowledge, and common skills, forming a strong and welcoming culture within the represented teams. As a result, knowledge workers enjoy autonomy, mastery, and purpose beyond their daily tasks.

In collaboration with the Scrum Masters, Cprime coaches have organized a strong and growing Agile Community of Practice supporting the Shanghai and UK teams’ ongoing stabilization.

The Results: Burgeoning Agile Maturity, Continuous Improvement, and Delighted Teams

By the end of November, the teams had worked together through eight sprints, each an improvement over the last. This trend of continuous improvement will continue and even accelerate as the new Agile leaders mature and the Cprime coaches are now free to focus only on coaching and development.

Excellent Net Promoter Scores (NPS) Following Training

Prior to Cprime’s involvement, the client had no formal process in place for measuring the efficacy and value of training and development. By introducing the NPS process, the coaches could measure the value of the Agile training programs they facilitated so that these, too, could continuously improve.

An NPS can range from -100 (very poor) to 100 (essentially perfect). The average NPSs for Cprime-led training courses in Shanghai were:

• 72.7 on the twelve core module courses
• 70.9 on the 15 bite-size sessions
• 74.3 on the seven role-based course

Delighted Team Members

Another measurement tool introduced by the coaches is a Coaching Assessment that allows the team members to rate the value of the coaching they are receiving. The following comments from team members reflect their sentiments:

• “The coaches encourage the teams and organize our meetings very well.”
• “They work very hard to help the teams.”
• “The Agile coaches are very good to new employees. They guide us through the projects, helping us understand the detailed background, and solving any problems or questions that come up along the way.”
• “Team meetings are held efficiently within a timebox, and we are avoiding unnecessary meetings.” 
• “The coaches have strong professional knowledge and are proactive in communicating with other groups, and escalating issues when necessary.”

The Shanghai teams are poised for continued growth and acceleration. With continued support from Cprime Agile Coaches and In collaboration with the Agile teams at the group level in the UK, we foresee ongoing success.

Ready to start your Agile transformation? Contact Cprime today!

The Client

In an era of online shopping and next-day delivery, this US-based Cprime client facilitates business continuity for thousands of brands worldwide. Their complex automated storage, retrieval, warehousing, and logistics solutions improve the flow of goods, materials, and information, allowing companies to meet the ever-growing expectations of global consumers.

Industry expertise, robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have made the company a global leader in materials handling and logistics. Its diverse clientele come from industries that include ecommerce, retail, food and beverage, manufacturing, and third-party logistics providers.

Challenge: Streamlining Modern Warehouse Design Pipelines to Enhance Pre-Sales Efficiency

Designing a modern automated warehousing solution is astonishingly complex. In an unoptimized environment, the sheer number of factors and volume of calculations required to create a design prototype for a new logistics facility can take weeks.

“A modern warehouse is essentially a collection of robots. It’s all spectacularly complicated,” explains Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA. “The scope, size, and throughput of modern warehouses, and the number of unique products in any given warehouse have grown beyond our human ability to calculate. Even machines struggle to crunch the numbers efficiently.”

While lengthy design calculation times were the company’s primary pain point, system complexity also resulted in an inability to react rapidly to change. Any updates to a customer’s operating parameters or facility specification would further delay pre-sales project modeling; the company had to recalculate each time-consuming potential design from scratch. The delays ranged from hours to weeks.

“If customers can’t get answers from us quickly, the dialogue stalls and the entire process can grind to a halt. We wanted to change that,” says one of the project’s executive sponsors.

“They were seeing new projects and revenues delayed by up to a quarter as they waited for a mathematical model. There was a potential cost of millions for each delay,” says Ryan. “The company needed a development framework that would allow them to put a pre-sales mathematical model of a warehouse in front of a customer faster, which meant boosting efficiency.”

To complicate matters, any development framework the company adopted had to be a good fit with Azure Batch, the cloud platform providing the computing power to manage the calculations. The company also needed an implementation partner that could work closely with the cloud specialists on-site to modernize, scale, and streamline its infrastructure to meet the growing demand of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers. 

Solution: Leveraging the GitLab Toolchain with Cprime Expert DevOps Services

Evaluating its options, the automated warehouse designer selected GitLab to provide the backbone for its new continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) initiative. Recognized for being robust, reliable, and secure, GitLab was the ideal CI/CD, collaboration, issue tracking, quality automation analysis, and code review tool. The GitLab toolchain contained everything the company needed to speed up development and enhance their predictive modeling sales tools and in-production logistics engines.

To implement the solution, GitLab recommended the Expert-Led GitLab Solutions and DevOps Services of Cprime, their Certified Training Partner.

“The Cprime DevOps team has invested heavily in GitLab professional services engineer certifications covering everything from CI/CD, project management, DevOps, and inner sourcing, to security and system admin,” explains Ryan. “But the requirements for this engagement went beyond professional GitLab implementation services. The company hired Cprime to show them how to take the GitLab toolchain and achieve elite DevOps CI/CD performance.” 

“The requirements for this engagement went beyond professional GitLab implementation services. The company hired Cprime to show them how to take the GitLab toolchain and achieve elite DevOps CI/CD performance.” — Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA

Discovering Context and Objectives Using Spikes

The two-person Cprime team began Discovery to define the company’s context and objectives clearly. They started by creating research tasks to identify and resolve questions and explore potential solutions.

“By creating technical spikes, we formed an understanding of their codebase and what they needed to achieve,” says Ryan. “Using those prototypes, we rapidly gathered feedback and verified we were on the right track.”

Tailoring Toolsets and Processes for the Azure Environment

After achieving consensus with the company’s management and DevOps teams, the Cprime team tailored the new GitLab instance to work specifically within the customer’s Microsoft Azure environment and security context.

“We created secure containers, CI/CD pipelines, and process templates,” says Ryan. “The result was a universal base implementation they could reuse across multiple projects to speed up development long term.”

Infrastructure as Code With Helm and Terraform

To ensure a consistent, easily deployed development environment, the Cprime team also worked with the company to leverage GitLab CI/CD’s native Terraform integration. Using the Terraform Helm provider allowed the company to begin centrally deploying Helm charts. This allowed it to manage high- and low-level Azure Kubernetes components, easily implement and modify Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) workflows, and simplify the creation of common and complex infrastructure patterns.

Throughout the process, Cprime worked to bridge the gaps, coordinating and driving innovation between company stakeholders, DevOps teams, and third-party Azure infrastructure architects.

“As implementation specialists, Cprime took the work of all the teams, rationalized it, and worked as the engine that put it into production,” says Ryan. “It was all about streamlining collaboration and automating the processes to speed up development.”

“As implementation specialists, Cprime took the output of all the teams, rationalized it, and put it into production using GitLab. It was all about streamlining collaboration and automating processes to accelerate development.” — Kevin Ryan, Cprime Head of DevOps, EMEA

Results: Increased Deployment Frequency and Reduced Error Rates 

Because of the combined efforts of Cprime and the project teams, the warehouse design company established high levels of process maturity based on DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) core metrics. Across the board, the company’s deployment frequency increased while it slashed its change lead times, change failure rates, and mean error recovery times.

Cumulative Change Dramatically Reduces Turnaround Times

As an indicator of the efficacy of the cumulative changes, the company reduced simulation times from over 11 hours to as few as 24 minutes. Turnarounds on proposal submissions showed similarly dramatic improvements.

“We’ve reduced the time to solution—from receiving customer data to running designs and calculations and ultimately giving out a warehouse proposal—from eight weeks down to one day,” the executive sponsor states. “The productivity increase has scaled our capacity to answer RFQs and engage with new and existing customers.”

Likewise, by using GitLab project templates, Terraform, and Helm scripts to automate their CI/CD pipeline, the company’s development team recently set a new turnaround record—they received a new specification and deployed the corrected warehouse design in only 90 minutes.

“We’ve reduced the time to solution—from having customer data to running designs and calculations and ultimately giving out a warehouse proposal—from eight weeks down to one day. The productivity increase has scaled our capacity to answer RFQs and engage with new and existing customers.” — Executive Sponsor

Getting There With Cprime

During the engagement, Cprime exceeded the client’s expectations for GitLab professional engineering services. Based on Cprime’s performance and the clear successes of phase one, the company has extended the relationship indefinitely.

“We started with a very short engagement and, based on our performance, over a year later we support all their GitLab and Azure-related activities,” says Ryan. “The company learned what I want all potential Cprime customers to understand: if you want to become a high-performing, elite development organization, Cprime will get you there.”

If you’d like to see similar results in your own organization, explore our flexible GitLab and DevOps solutions.