Product development, process improvement, quality assurance and testing — these are just a few of the things that engineers make possible for companies. Whether it's for a company founded in the 19th century or a 21st-century app-based startup, engineers play an essential and significant role in simply making things work.
That said, their work is far from simple. Built In Chicago spoke with engineers at two such companies — one revolutionizing its legacy brand to meet modern farming needs and the other crafting a new approach to manage vehicles — to learn what they have been developing lately, what makes their projects particularly exciting and how their engineering team culture makes it possible.
John Deere applies petabytes of precision data to its 180 years of innovation to build intelligent, connected machines that sustain people and the planet.
Describe the product or feature you worked on. What does it do, and what was your role in creating it?
I am a principal engineering leader providing servant leadership to our parts organization, empowering our product teams to deliver a modernized technology stack that provides business capabilities that range from procuring materials, managing orders from our dealers and managing the operations of our parts warehouses worldwide.
Our solutions enhance our distribution capabilities and provide automation processes to ensure parts are available where and when needed. That’s accomplished by achieving several intermediate goals, one of which is replacing aging systems that reduce our mainframe footprint and eliminate legacy risks. We also create decoupled architecture that leverages our API-first approach, driving a seamless integration and user experience. We leverage our enterprise data lake to use the plethora of data available to automate data-driven decisions.
Further, we increase the use of automated tools and processes to achieve a continuous delivery pipeline for all our products. To drive optimization and efficiency over the whole lifecycle, we leverage 5G, IoT devices and sensors, automation and advanced technologies.
What was the most exciting or interesting aspect of working on this product or feature?
With a modern technology stack, we can position our parts business for future opportunities with digital transformation to better connect with dealers and suppliers and to operate a more efficient operation around the world. Taking advantage of the petabytes of data we have available and the use of automation and advanced technologies, we differentiate ourselves by providing a more sustainable, connected experience and increased global visibility. It saves our dealers and customers money and time.
Though we are still early in our modernization journey, by leveraging innovative approaches and flexibility in how we release changes to our users, we realize operational efficiencies and increased value while minimizing disruption to current operations.
Leveraging 5G in the yard and warehouse gives us the opportunity to use devices and sensors to collect data in real time, something we’ve never had before. Combining that with the plethora of data across the full lifecycle available in our enterprise data lake we can optimize our operations and logistics. This gets parts to our dealers and customers much more quickly and efficiently — again, saving them time and money.
How did your engineering team culture support the successful creation of this new product or feature?
Our engineering team culture is all about agile development and small incremental releases. Though these ways of working are new for our teams, there is already increased comfort in failing, learning and evolving as we know more. This new culture has increased empowerment within our teams, which fosters the cross-product integration and innovation required to achieve our goals.
To allow us to scale quicker while maintaining high quality, security and service standards, our teams are working to implement continuous delivery pipelines that leverage automated end-to-end and security testing prior to deploying to production.
As we modernize, our teams are taking on a growth mindset that enables continuous upskilling in modern practices, technologies and tools. These give our teams the capability to innovate, implement and support our modern technology stack.
As we modernize, our teams are taking on a growth mindset that enables continuous upskilling in modern practices, technologies and tools.”
The greatest success by far is our people and the relationships we build every day as we innovate, learn and struggle. Working as a team, we can collectively meet our goals through pairing and helping each other while building long-lasting personal connections and having fun along the way.
CarAdvise revolutionizes the way people manage their vehicles by offering convenience and options for their car care experience.
Describe the product or feature you worked on. Be specific. What does it do, and what was your role in creating it?
We recently created a feature for our CarAdvise retail web and mobile app called “Maintenance Reminders.” This feature allows our users to see the Maintenance Schedule for their vehicles, including when they need upcoming services and what is past due based on the estimated mileage they are at. CarAdvise has 1.7 million of these vehicles and the challenge was to get and maintain data for all these vehicles, the time and schedule intervals for each vehicle.
I was the lead on that project and I architected the project keeping the following principles in mind: speed, resiliency and accuracy.
We decided to cache the data for all the past due and upcoming miles for each vehicle. We used Redis cache with multi-AZ distribution. We decided to cache some of the data on users’ browser cache to make things easier to fetch. We next ran a scheduled background job that goes to a third-party partner to get the maintenance schedule data. Then we designed the job to be accurate and resilient by introducing queuing technology to queue the data and then a processor to process the data based on a vehicle’s year, make and model.
What was the most exciting or interesting aspect of working on this product or feature?
The most exciting and challenging aspect was how to refresh the data on scheduled intervals and calculate the estimated mileage of all the 1.7 million vehicles we have in our database. We had to do a lot of math to understand all the scenarios. Also, schedule oil changes taking miles as well as months into consideration. We also had to consider updating the schedules when the user performs a service from CarAdvise versus non-recommended duplicate services.
How did your engineering team culture support the successful creation of this new product or feature?
We started with a technical analysis and project understanding as we do for any project. We then as a team came up with different solutions and cherry-picked the pros and cons for each of the answers.
