BMW accelerates BI migration with Storm Reply’s AI solution on AWS

BMW faced a daunting challenge: migrating its extensive BI infrastructure that’s used by 270 application teams across the organization. What seemed like a straightforward dashboard migration project at first revealed itself to be far more complex, with over 10,000 multilevel, multiview dashboards requiring careful handling of intricate data connections and calculations.

“We have throughout the company over 270 application teams that have BI reporting, and as part of our cloud migration effort, we're moving all those BI tools to the cloud,” says George Ferencz, initiative manager for DevOps Hub Americas at BMW. “When you realize that these 270 applications have more than 10,000 dashboards that would have to get migrated, and that even a medium-complexity dashboard can take 7–10 days for a professional BI engineer—you understand the scale of the challenge.”

The company needed a strategic partner who could both understand BMW’s operations and apply AWS capabilities effectively. BMW found that partner in Storm Reply, which, like BMW, is based in Munich. “Between the relationship that Storm Reply had with BMW and the work that it was doing in the AI space, it was obviously a good choice for us to begin that relationship,” says Ferencz.

Storm Reply developed a solution using Amazon Bedrock, a comprehensive, secure, and flexible service for building generative AI applications and agents. Using the generative AI capabilities of Amazon Bedrock helped Storm Reply to automate the complex process of migrating dashboards to Amazon QuickSight—a service that delivers unified BI at scale. Storm Reply’s solution not only extracts and transfers data but also recreates complex calculated fields and formulas across different toolsets.

“The ability to use generative AI to get that information out was key,” says Ferencz. “It gave us the ability to build calculated fields to take the calculations from one tool stack and then bring it into Amazon QuickSight.”

The solution goes beyond simple migration, incorporating Amazon Q—a generative AI assistant for accelerating software development—to facilitate conversational interactions with data. This helps users to gain quick insights through natural language queries, enhancing the analytical capabilities available to BMW’s teams.

The implementation of Storm Reply’s solution has transformed BMW’s BI migration process, reducing dashboard migration time from 7–10 days to just hours. This acceleration helps BMW to realize the cost benefits of cloud-based analytics sooner while providing teams with enhanced data visualization and analysis capabilities.

“This will bring savings to the company; we’ll accelerate migration so that we can benefit from these new features. And we can take advantage of the pricing position of Amazon QuickSight a lot sooner,” says Ferencz. “It's a win-win for everybody that's involved in the end: We can more quickly transform our company and take advantage of all these great technologies and these great features that are going to help to improve our business.”

The success of this initiative highlights the importance of strong partnerships in driving digital transformation. “It’s not possible unless you have good teams,” says Ferencz. “It’s not just what BMW have internally, it’s who we partner with. AWS and Storm Reply have been great collaborators in this, and we never would be where we are right now without their support.”