Cutting Cost by 20% and Reducing Carbon Emissions by Incorporating VECTO on AWS with AUSY and MAN

MAN Truck & Bus (MAN) worked alongside AUSY, an AWS Partner, to build a flexible managed solution that meets stringent emissions requirements in the European Union. MAN manufactures a wide portfolio of commercial vehicles. By law, it needed to incorporate the Vehicle Energy Consumption Calculation Tool (VECTO) into its operations. Using Amazon ECS, AWS Fargate, and other AWS services, AUSY and MAN migrated from an on-premises infrastructure to a cloud-based solution that cut costs 20 percent, while also reducing the corresponding carbon emissions from the IT infrastructure. MAN has scaled up to process 35,000 calculations per month and is preparing for further EU mandates coming in 2024.

MAN Truck & Bus (MAN) faced a mandate to meet carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions standards in the commercial vehicles that it manufactures. But the German company wanted to go beyond the legal requirements of the European Union. MAN’s customers ultimately would benefit if it could implement an optimized IT infrastructure that cut costs and contributed to the company’s sustainability goals.

MAN’s parent company, Volkswagen, had widely incorporated the use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in its operations. For help with the technology that it needed to address the new emissions standards, MAN turned to AUSY Technologies AG (AUSY), an AWS Partner that provides custom software development and consulting services for companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. AUSY and MAN, along with the automotive consulting company EFS, built a scalable, managed solution that cut the carbon footprint of MAN’s infrastructure by 20 percent alongside a corresponding decrease in cost as it scaled up to process 35,000 calculations per month.

MAN—pronounced using its initials M-A-N—manufactures a full range of vehicles for commercial use, from small delivery vans to heavy-duty trucks and buses and coaches. As of 2023, around 50,000 vehicles per year are subject to a 2017 law that codified EU emissions standards. The regulation mandated that all trucks sold in the European Union with a gross vehicle weight of more than 7,500 kg (16,535 lb.) had to publicly display emissions information calculated by the European Commission’s Vehicle Energy Consumption Calculation Tool (VECTO). VECTO simulates CO2 emissions and fuel consumption per individual vehicle. It uses granular data from the manufacturer, such as air drag, gearbox friction, and engine performance. MAN faced a strict enforcement deadline of January 1, 2019, to figure out how to work VECTO reporting and monitoring mandates into its IT infrastructure. “It was a simple decision not to do it by ourselves,” says Markus Bayer, MAN’s project manager for VECTO declarations. “The big issue was that this was a completely new project for us. We looked at many external providers to see who could do this.”

MAN had already been collaborating with AUSY on a solution for issuing registration documents and elected to expand the relationship. Together, MAN and AUSY incorporated VECTO into MAN’s existing product logic, which is a sort of computer-coded instruction manual behind every truck’s configuration details, down to the individual screws. AUSY split the data into 18 different modules running in 80 containers that processed 1.2 million calculations per year using an on-premises infrastructure. The solution required powerful machines with high CPU and memory to handle intense VECTO simulations that take up to 90 seconds per calculation. In the spring of 2022, the company looked for a more sustainable, manageable solution. “The headline was ‘MAN goes cloud,’” says Bayer. “It became clear that AWS was the place for us to go for the infrastructure and many processes that we needed.”

MAN’s IT department had 8 months to meet an internal cost reduction deadline in cooperation with Bayer’s project team. AUSY elected to lift and shift the architecture to the cloud without making substantial changes to the applications. It migrated the modules to cloud-native, open-source Payara Servers. The Payara Servers run inside containers on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service that simplifies an organization’s deployment, management, and scaling of containerized applications. MAN further removed operational overhead by incorporating AWS Fargate, a serverless, pay-as-you-go compute engine that lets businesses focus on building applications without managing servers. “We have no underlying infrastructure to take care of,” says Istvan Kappelmayer, cloud architect at AUSY. “It’s a nice serverless-based solution.”

MAN also faced the challenge of migrating its large database—3.2 TB—to the cloud. Instead of attempting a manual upload that would take at least 4 days, AUSY implemented AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a managed migration and replication service that migrates database and analytics workloads to AWS quickly, securely, and with minimal downtime and zero data loss. “Using AWS DMS, our database was prepared weeks in advance compared with a manual application,” says Kappelmayer. “We just had to switch off the old application, wait for our continual data capture to complete, and switch on the new one.” The cutover time was around 12 hours, and the entire data migration time took 36 hours during a weekend.

MAN built a special caching service within the application on AWS and now handles 35,000 calculations per month. “We had performance issues before switching to AWS,” says Bayer. “They are gone now. Using AWS, we have the flexibility to ramp up and down.” Operating its downsized infrastructure on AWS, MAN decreased costs by 20 percent and experienced a corresponding sustainability benefit. “We reduced costs by 20 percent, and we estimated this to be at least a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions from using less electricity compared to the mainframes that were used before,” says Kevin Humphries, senior consultant for IT and business at AUSY. Rather than running continuously, calculations happen on demand, and the infrastructure scales to exactly what’s needed. “AWS is the ideal collaborator for sustainable business solutions and, therefore, for our CO2 declaration processes,“ says Bayer.

Additionally, developers have more time to work on business-critical applications. “It’s a motivation for the developers, because everyone is excited by going to the cloud,” says Humphries. “And it’s good to have a more modern configuration, of course.”

Alongside AUSY, MAN continues to focus on optimizing fuel efficiency in its vehicles, not only to meet legal requirements but also to better serve customers. “AWS has been simple to use, it’s well documented, and it’s working just awesome,” Humphries says. “We rely on AWS and plan to in the future.”

In January 2024, the European Union will be expanding emissions standards to include buses and medium-duty trucks and all alternative powertrains available in the industry. “There will be additional tasks to do and requirements to meet, and we plan to do that with AUSY,” says Bayer. “We rely on AUSY’s flexibility. That’s what is making this project successful.”