Inchcape chooses RISE with SAP to drive transformation

Michiel-SAP MD

Key Takeaways

Inchcape has chosen RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to shift its critical sales, marketing, and operational systems to a centralized and scalable cloud platform, enhancing data accessibility and security.

As one of the first UK businesses to implement RISE with SAP on Google Cloud, Inchcape aims to improve its ability to analyze consumer buying trends amid changing market dynamics, driving better service and operational efficiency.

The partnership will enable Inchcape to significantly reduce technology infrastructure costs while enhancing employee experience and leveraging data insights for innovative business models in the rapidly evolving automotive industry.

Inchcape, a global multi-brand automotive distributor, has selected RISE with SAP on Google Cloud to bring its business-critical sales, marketing and operations systems, and data to the cloud.

Inchcape partners with major automotive manufacturers in over 36 countries and currently runs SAP for many aspects of its business, from logistics to finance. By moving these workloads onto Google Cloud through RISE with SAP, Inchcape will be able to join a diverse range of datasets into a centralised, secure and scalable platform.

Under the new alliance, Inchcape will become one of the first UK businesses to run SAP on Google Cloud as part of the RISE with SAP offering.

Mark Dearnley, chief digital officer at Inchcape, said: “The way people buy cars has fundamentally changed over the last 18 months, so it’s key that we’re evolving in line with consumer expectations. Globally, car manufacturers rely on us to understand what cars people are buying and how they buy them, and at the heart of responding to that is data. Being able to harness RISE with SAP to capture these insights, build our cloud capability, improve employee experience, and deliver a service that is in line with what buyers want is absolutely crucial.”

Michiel Verhoeven, managing director of SAP UK & Ireland, said: “Given the rapidly changing economic environment, businesses need to optimise business and operational models and innovate to be successful in the future. The automotive market is at an important crossroads as it is primed to take advantage of the digitalisation that is happening across industries. Inchcape is setting off on an exciting cloud journey, one where it can expect to significantly reduce tech infrastructure maintenance and operating costs, and improve financial efficiency and employee experience, globally. SAP is the right partner to support Inchcape’s mission to move to the cloud.”

Dominik Wee, managing director of global automotive, manufacturing and energy at Google Cloud, added: “The global pandemic has accelerated the digital transformations of many businesses. To remain a leader in the automotive market, Inchcape is accelerating the migration of SAP workloads to the cloud to gain greater agility, elasticity, uptime, and benefits from greater data insight and analytics capabilities. Technical services from RISE, as well as migration services from Google Cloud and our partners, will help to eliminate technical barriers to cloud migration providing Inchcape with a foundation to digitally transform services. We’re committed to providing a smooth path to the cloud for SAP and RISE customers, and we will continue to invest in infrastructure capabilities and services for them.”