How Avis is using digital to lower 'peak stress' for customers
Sunners also told us that Avis had used Mindtree to help with its data centre consolidation, taking its data sites from 14 to just two, "pretty much on an as-is basis."
"Managing all of the distributed data centres, with their different environments, and doing it with suppliers, was hugely inefficient, and so merging them all into a central location, managed by a single team, has allowed us to do a number things: it's allowed us to rationalise our supplier [and] it's allowed us to rationalise our applications; when we started we had something in the realm of 700 applications in our catalogue."
Avis and Mindtree went through that catalogue and categorised apps as enterprise, for those used in every country, and non-enterprise, for those used in only a single location. The latter apps are now curated by Mindtree on a break-fix contract, while Avis spends its own resources on developing the enterprise solutions; the aim is to have all locations using the same app to take the same action.
"When I last checked, the number of non-enterprise [apps] had dropped to about three hundred, so we're seeing significant savings there," said Sunners.
App development was moved to the Avis UK HQ in Bracknell at the same time as the data centre consolidation, which meant that the company moved away from using contractors: at one point it had about 40 distributed IT teams, based around local contractors, many of whom were established freelancers. That presented a problem, though:
"In some cases those contractors [had] been around for an awful long time; there were all sorts of concerns about intellectual property residing with people that didn't actually work for the company. They'd been around for so long that in many ways they could be considered employees, but that wouldn't have been so financially attractive."
At the time of the move, Avis changed its internal IT structure and entered into a master service agreement with Mindtree in Europe, as it was already doing in North America. "They quickly became - by revenue - our largest IT partner in international markets," Sunners noted.
The future
Looking ahead, Avis is putting a significant focus on connected cars. About 10 per cent of its current fleet is defined as ‘connected', and the aim is to hit 100 per cent of the corporate fleet by 2020.
Then there are autonomous ("We're at the bleeding edge," says Sunners) and electric cars ("We're deploying 300 electric vehicles into our Zipcar fleet in London this summer"), as well as the company's plans for connected cities.
"We have our connected city trials in Kansas, where we have, in one geographical location, 5,000 vehicles in a fleet that are all 100 per cent connected, and we're learning lots of operational efficiency gains from having that data at our fingertips. We're learning lots about fleet movement, about customers; we're working hand-in-hand with Kansas, which is an enlightened connected city. We're working out how to fit into the overall mobility landscape…
"Our ecosystem is much more than the vehicles...and we are truly looking at mobility services, way beyond what we provide today, and we've built a very comprehensive view and strategy of how we win there. We're not seeing the same from what we would consider to be our traditional competitors. We have demonstrated to many...how we see our future role, and how we're going to achieve it."
