Migration & Modernization
How Mahindra & Mahindra modernized their Dealer Management System to drive efficiency and agility
This post is co-written with Sanjeev Trivedi from Mahindra and Mahindra Limited.
In this blog post, you will learn how Mahindra & Mahindra’s Automotive Division modernized their legacy Dealer Management System to reduce operational cost while improving business agility and dealer experience.
Introduction
Mahindra & Mahindra’s (M&M) Automotive Division, part of the $19 billion Mahindra Group, is India’s leading Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV)manufacturer. With monthly sales exceeding 50,000 vehicles and a vast network of over 2,000 dealership locations across India, the company has established itself as a cornerstone of India’s automotive sector.
At the heart of M&M’s dealer operations lies their Dealer Management System (DMS), a mission-critical platform that processes everything from vehicle bookings and retail to delivery management and claims. This system serves as the digital backbone for approximately 30,000 active users across their dealer network, handling more than 50,000 vehicle sales monthly and processing retail and deliveries daily.
The system manages peak loads of up to 3,000 concurrent user sessions and supports various business functions like vehicle sales and booking management, exchange and claim processing ,retail order management and delivery, financial accounting and dealer business operations as well as analytics and reporting for business insights.
In this blog, we first describe the motivation and trigger for modernizing the legacy DMS portal. Then we explain the migration path and approach to the modernization. We then deep-dive into the solution architecture where we describe the various architecture aspects such as data migration, authentication, integration with internal and third-party services, DevOps, and the overall solution architecture. Then we explain the business outcome with the modernized portal before we conclude with the summary and next steps.
Business and Technical Challenges
In this section we discuss the business and technical challenges that triggered the need for modernizing the DMS. M&M’s legacy DMS, while functional, faced multiple critical limitations that hindered business agility and dealer efficiency. As a traditional on-premises, monolithic application, the system struggled to keep pace with the company’s growing digital needs and evolving market demands. Some of the key challenges faced were:
- Performance bottlenecks – Legacy on-premises system struggled with peak loads, causing degradation and downtime during critical business periods.
- Scalability constraints – Inability to dynamically adjust to varying demands led to inefficient resource utilization and hindered business growth.
- Integration challenges – Monolithic architecture limited extensibility, requiring complex adaptations to integrate with modern technologies and hindering the implementation of new digital capabilities
- Operational inefficiencies – Long turnaround times for updates, complex deployment processes, and manual scaling operations resulted in increased risk and reduced responsiveness to changing workloads.
- Limited visibility – Inadequate monitoring and observability capabilities hampered proactive issue identification and resolution.
- Business impact – System limitations affected customer service quality, delayed new feature rollouts
The Journey to Modernization
In this section we explain the approach taken by M&M to migrate from the legacy portal to the modern system. When faced with the decision to modernize their DMS, M&M’s technology team conducted a thorough evaluation of available options. The critical choice was between purchasing a Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) product or building a custom cloud-native solution. While several customer relationship management (CRM) and dealer management products were available in the market, the decision wasn’t straightforward.
Over the years, M&M has developed unique business processes that gave it a competitive advantage in the market. The evaluated COTS products could not adequately support M&M’s specialized workflows without extensive customization. The required modifications would have resulted in substantial development efforts and costs, potentially matching or exceeding the effort required to build a custom solution. Furthermore, the customization would have created dependencies on product vendors’ support and upgrade cycles, which could impact M&M’s ability to respond to market needs rapidly.
Another crucial factor was intellectual property protection. Customizing a third-party product would mean investing considerable resources in improving the product itself, with no ownership of the enhanced capabilities. The team also identified concerns about the inflexibility of product release timelines, which could potentially hinder M&M’s vehicle launch schedules and market responsiveness.
After careful consideration, M&M chose to build a custom cloud-native solution on AWS. This decision was guided by several key principles: the need to accelerate time-to-market, ensure security and scalability, maintain reliability and resilience, implement comprehensive monitoring, and optimize total cost of ownership. The team also saw an opportunity to leverage advanced analytics and machine learning capabilities that would be essential for future innovations.
The decision to partner with AWS was influenced by their extensive experience in the automotive industry and their comprehensive suite of managed services. AWS’s global presence and proven track record in handling mission-critical workloads aligned well with M&M’s requirements for a robust, scalable, and secure platform.
Solution Architecture
M&M’s next-generation DMS (DMS 2.0) is architected as a modern, cloud-native solution leveraging AWS’s managed services portfolio. The solution is designed to be secure, scalable, and resilient from the ground up, with a strong focus on operational excellence and cost optimization.
At the foundation of this transformation is a well-structured landing zone implemented using AWS Control Tower. This provides a secure, multi-account AWS environment with established guardrails for security, compliance, and operations. The environment is segregated into non-production and production accounts, each with its own baseline security and networking configurations. Integration with Microsoft Entra through AWS IAM Identity Center enables seamless single sign-on capabilities for M&M’s corporate users.
Figure 01 : AWS Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower
Until DMS 2.0 gets completely migrated to AWS, the legacy DMS will continue to be used by the users. Hybrid network connectivity using an AWS Direct Connect Hosted Connection between the customer’s data center and AWS allows both systems to be accessible simultaneously, with AWS Site-to-Site VPN as a backup connection for resilience. The transactional data is kept in-sync between the legacy DMS system and the next-gen DMS system via API level integration using Amazon managed streaming for Apache Kafka (MSK) as the message queue. As part of phased migration, M&M decided to move the sales module to AWS Cloud. This allows the legacy DMS users to have a seamless user experience switching between the legacy and the modern portal. In order for the developers to connect to the AWS resources securely and privately, port forwarding with AWS Systems Manager Session Manager is used.
The application architecture follows a microservices approach, with containerized services deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). This marks a significant shift from the monolithic architecture of the legacy system. The microservices handle distinct business functions such as vehicle sales, service management, and spare parts inventory, allowing for independent scaling and deployment. Amazon Application Load Balancer (ALB) and Network Load Balancer (NLB) work in conjunction with Amazon API Gateway to manage traffic distribution and API access. Amazon Route 53 connects the client with the DMS 2.0 Amazon CloudFront distribution domain name. The static web pages are served from an Amazon S3 bucket via CloudFront distribution. The Amazon API Gateway private integration allows services running on EKS cluster to be available to the clients outside the DMS2.0 Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) securely using NLB and ALB.
API gateway also handles rate limiting and SSL termination. Traffic is routed via Amazon API Gateway which sends traffic to the services hosted inside EKS via AWS PrivateLink to NLB. The egress traffic is routed to an appliance VPC for deep packet inspection before the traffic is sent out via NAT Gateway.
Figure 02 : DMS core solution architecture
For data management, the solution utilizes Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition for transactional data, providing high availability across multiple availability zones. Amazon DocumentDB serves as the NoSQL database for specific workloads requiring high-performance, low-latency access. The entire data migration from the legacy system is orchestrated using AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) with change data capture (CDC) capabilities, ensuring minimal disruption to business operations during the transition. First, a staging database is created using replication engine. A custom spooling layer is provisioned to generate files in Apache Parquet format for the data. The parquet files are classified based on the data age. The files are temporarily stored in an NFS/SMB based file store. AWS DataSync, which is a secure data migration and data discovery service is used to move the files securely to an S3 bucket in customer’s AWS account. An AWS Glue job gets triggered on notification which parses and transforms the parquet files before writing to Aurora. The transactional data is kept in-sync between the legacy DMS system and the DMS 2.0 system using API level integration.
Figure 03 : Data migration architecture – Full load and CDC(Change data capture)
In the previous version of DMS, the authentication functionality was fragmented across multiple data and identity stores, which was hard to maintain. M&M wanted a scalable and serverless approach that unifies the authentication scenarios while retaining the flexibility to grant access based on existing roles and permissions. M&M chose Amazon Cognito, a managed customer identity and access management service that scales to millions of users, and that provides seamless integration with industry standard protocols, and identity providers. Amazon Cognito UserPool is used to authenticate users, who were migrated from a CSV file. The user permissions are read from a custom user profile data store, which was migrated from an on-prem relational database in to an RDS Aurora PostgreSQL database. Since M&M uses Microsoft Entra as the primary identity provider. Amazon IAM identity Center is configured with Microsoft Entra as a SAML provider in the control tower management account.
Figure 04 : Authentication flows orchestrated with Cognito
A sophisticated integration layer is built using Amazon API Gateway and Amazon Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka (Amazon MSK)and Amazon AppFlow to handle communications with various external systems including Salesforce, SAP, and government portals like mParivahan. This integration layer allows the platform to seamlessly integrate with external applications, supporting both real-time and batch use cases.
Figure 05 : Integration flows for Dealer Management System
To ensure robust DevOps practices, the team implemented a comprehensive code build and deployment pipeline using AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy. This automation enables rapid and reliable deployments while maintaining security and compliance requirements. Application monitoring and observability are achieved through a combination of Amazon CloudWatch, AWS X-Ray, and Logstash, providing real-time insights into system performance and business metrics.
Figure 06 : DevOps pipeline for Dealer Management System
Business Outcomes and Benefits
The modernization of M&M’s DMS has delivered significant improvements in operational efficiency, system performance, and business agility. The transformation from an on-premises monolithic system to a cloud-native solution on AWS has created tangible value for both the business and its dealer network.
Performance and scalability improvements have been particularly noteworthy. The new system automatically scales to handle peak loads without performance degradation. Dealers now experience consistent response times regardless of concurrent user load, enabling them to serve customers more efficiently. The system has become more robust and reliable, now capable of handling new product launches seamlessly while maintaining smooth business-as-usual(BAU) processes, even during periods of high session activity.
The microservices architecture has dramatically reduced the time required to implement new features and enhancements. What previously took months in the legacy system can now be accomplished in weeks or even days, through automated CI/CD pipelines. This agility has enabled Mahindra to rapidly respond to market needs and roll out new capabilities across their dealer network.
Cost optimization has been another key achievement. The pay-as-you-go approach for pricing in AWS, combined with auto-scaling capabilities, has eliminated the need for peak-load infrastructure sizing. Development and testing environments can be spun up on demand and decommissioned when not in use, leading to cost savings. The use of managed services has reduced operational overheads, such as patching, allowing the technology team to focus on business innovation rather than infrastructure management.
The new system’s robust integration capabilities has improved data flow between dealers, corporate systems, and external partners. Real-time analytics and comprehensive monitoring has provided better visibility into business operations, enabling data-driven decision-making at both dealer and corporate levels. Adherence to AWS Security Reference Architecture during design and implementation phase and incorporation of features like single sign-on and fine-grained access controls, has also strengthened the overall security framework.
Conclusion
In this blog we looked at M&M’s journey in modernizing the DMS to improve business agility and end user experience, while managing cost and performance.The modernized platform enabled them to support landmark sales for their recent vehicle launches while setting them up for future vehicle launches. In the near future, M&M plans to migrate off completely from the legacy DMS and leverage the modernized platform to extend their competitive advantage in automobile industry.
While the above blog gives you a point of view on how M&M chartered their modernization journey, it is important to note that application modernization is a customized journey. The specific approach depends on several factors such as application complexity, availability of skilled resources and desired business outcomes. AWS can help you assess how your company can get the most value from cloud and charter your modernization journey. Contact us to start your migration and modernization journey today.