Finning is a Canadian heavy equipment dealer and the largest Caterpillar (CAT) dealer in the world.

Finning

In partnership with Invero, Finning built a highly scalable customer portal on Azure leveraging modern cloud technologies.

Headquarters: Edmonton, AB, Canada
Countries of Operation: Canada, United Kingdom, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Ireland

The Challenge

Launching a Digital Platform to Support Innovation

Finning needed a digital solution that would allow them to:

  • First, build a customer web portal for CAT customers around the world
  • Second, gather real-time data and telematics from IoT devices on customers’ vehicles and tools
  • Then, meet customers’ need to optimize uptime and productivity through telemetry equipment data
  • After that, give their customers with Power BI dashboards that leverage predictive analytics
  • Lastly, address the issue of time-consuming manual deployments

The Solution

Integrating With Finning’s Team to Deliver Faster Together

Our Approach
  • Embed members of our own team into Finning’s development team to support the Azure platform build and minimize their long-term operational costs.
  • Enable engineers to focus on rapid solution development, rather than worrying about managing any on-premise infrastructure.
  • Introduce a set of templates that allows the team to build up and tear down entire development environments with the click of a button.
Technology Used
  • Microsoft Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) App Services
  • Azure Resource Manager (ARM)
  • Azure DevOps
  • CI/CD pipelines for automated deployments
  • Azure Kubernetes Service and Docker Containers
  • Azure Functions
  • Power BI

The Results

A Modern Platform that Improves Time to Market and ROI

$100,000+ Estimated Savings for Every Build

Finning now runs a leaner operation, deploying an entire production environment from start to finish in less than an hour by a single person. Previously this would have taken weeks and multiple people with different skill sets.

Creating New Digital Revenue Streams

As their customers can now track their data, order parts and manage their fleet online, Finning has created a new digital business model. They are set to achieve their strategic goal of innovation while improving their customer experience and growing return on invested capital (ROIC).

Norman Carr
Digital Enterprise Architect at Finning

Enabled strategy to execute on several technology projects. I like the broad skill set across the team, their understanding of technology best practices, and the targeted delivery on statements of work.

Pablo Garcia
Software Development Lead, Finning

One of the key things for success is that there is no ‘us’ and ‘them’. We’re one team trying to deliver to this platform. If you go to a meeting with multiple people, you don’t know who is from which team.

Delivering Digital Innovation Services and Practical Solutions

To carry out this digital initiative, Invero worked hand-in-hand with Finning to:

  • Assess and update traditional development methods to enable faster time to market and rapid deployments
  • Build an Azure DevOps automated deployment pipeline (including complex ARM templates for Infrastructure as Code) that not only deploys the entire Azure infrastructure, but also Finning’s application code to development, QA, staging and production
  • Modernize their data estate using Azure to ingest data from IoT devices
  • Take advantage of PaaS and serverless technologies to deliver cost-effective solutions