Seamless Launch, Lasting Impact: The Mahindra XUV 3XO Story

Business Opportunity

Developing Scalable Platform for Digital Bookings

Mahindra & Mahindra, a leader in the automotive industry, is renowned for its innovative vehicles and commitment to excellence. The key expectation from Mahindra & Mahindra was to effectively launch their new XUV 3XO online, necessitating a robust booking platform to convert potential customers, by streamlining and enhancing their online booking process. 

Not only did we achieve the primary goals of the implementation, but we also improved total cost savings on the cloud with the new launch. Niveus built a scalable and responsive microsite to efficiently manage peak loads during the pre-launch and booking stages for both end-users and dealers. The solution successfully handled an impressive 50,000 bookings within the first 60 minutes, demonstrating the effectiveness of the microsite in managing high traffic and optimizing resource use.

The Challenge

Mahindra & Mahindra was offering a discounted price for their first 50,000 bookings. The client was anticipating a surge in traffic due to the special pricing that could possibly crash the website due to excessive load, negatively impacting the business of all other vehicles. The site had to be designed to handle this traffic seamlessly without impacting the overall performance. Before this launch, we had assisted the client with the immensely successful launches of their two major vehicles each with their own Online Booking Platform – the Scorpio-N and the XUV400. So the stakes (and expectations) were high for this launch.

Our Solution

Niveus planned to build and deploy a scalable and responsive microsite to handle peak loads during the pre-launch and booking stage for end-users and dealers. This time, to take control of various scenarios on the fly, an administrative panel was developed and deployed to manage the launch application and view relevant data via dashboards and reports. We integrated the system with Payment Gateway (PayU), Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Google Analytics. Also, data captured in the system is available to external applications/databases via Cloud Pub/Sub, along with Excel file downloads. 

The front-end web application uses ReactJS for smooth development and native-like performance across mobile and desktop platforms. NodeJS powers the microservice-based back-end, providing scalability and flexibility. The application is hosted on Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Spanner, Cloud Firestore, Cloud Memorystore, and Google Cloud Storage. The back-end REST API is designed with Microservices Design Patterns for independent service deployment.

For this launch, we carefully analyzed and optimized the infrastructure and reduced the infrastructure usage by 95% compared to the previous launch thus saving the cost by a huge margin.

Benefits of Developing Launch Platform with Niveus

• Customer Experience Enhancement: By leveraging Niveus’ expertise and Google Cloud Platform’s capabilities, Mahindra can now create personalized and seamless experiences for their customers on their launch platform, boosting satisfaction and loyalty.
• Productivity Improvement: Niveus leverages GCP’s tools and technologies to automate processes and enhance collaboration, empowering teams to work more efficiently and achieve better results.
• Improvement in Brand Engagement, Loyalty, and Trust: Choosing to develop applications with Niveus enabled Mahindra to deliver consistent brand messaging, transparency, and value-added services, strengthening customer relationships and trust in the brand.
• Future Proofing: By leveraging GCP’s scalability and Niveus’ innovation, Mahindra can now adapt to evolving market trends and technologies, ensuring long-term relevance and competitiveness.
• Business Continuity: Niveus’ expertise in resilience planning, coupled with GCP’s redundancy and backup systems, provides Mahindra with the assurance of uninterrupted operations, even in the face of unexpected disruptions.

Results

All the systems were stable throughout the launch. The decision to tweak the infrastructure was driven by the need to balance cost and performance. The new VMs offered higher performance at a lower cost, making them a more efficient choice for handling the expected load during the vehicle launch.

• 50,000 bookings in the first 60 minutes: Unmatched performance that handled 50,000 bookings within the first hour, ensuring a flawless and uninterrupted user experience during peak demand. 
• 1,00,000 concurrent users capacity: Designed to scale effortlessly, our infrastructure supports up to 1,00,000 concurrent users, guaranteeing smooth operations even under high-traffic scenarios.
• Efficiency Improvement: By optimizing the infrastructure and switching to more efficient VMs, we were able to significantly reduce the number of VMs required. This reduction, 95% compared to the previous launches, indicated a major improvement in resource utilization. With CPU usage peaking at 26% and memory at 40.44%, resources were well within limits, ensuring capacity to handle traffic surges.
• 38% Cost Savings: Optimizing and tuning up the infrastructure not only reduced the complexity of managing the infrastructure but also resulted in 38% cost savings.
• Scalability: The GKE cluster had a significant capacity to handle high traffic. The CPU and memory usage metrics indicated that there was ample headroom, suggesting that the infrastructure was well-provisioned and handled the additional load effectively.
• Database Performance: Google Cloud Spanner, being a high-performance, globally distributed database service, performed efficiently with CPU usage under 30%. This suggested that the database layer handled the requests and transactions without significant latency or performance degradation.
• Request Handling: The microsite was tested to handle up to 18,000 requests per second, showcasing strong backend and front-end optimization for fast responses and a seamless user experience.
• User Load: The microsite was tested to handle up to 30,000 concurrent users with provision to scale up to 1,00,000 concurrent users for this launch. 
• SMS and Payment Transactions: The peak SMS and PayU transactions indicated that the microsite facilitated significant real-time interactions, such as user notifications and payments. Ensuring the infrastructure handled these spikes was crucial for maintaining a seamless user experience.

Power of Partnership

Our longstanding collaboration with Mahindra was instrumental in their launch success. Here’s why:

• Expertise: Our deep knowledge of cloud infrastructure and development ensured a robust solution.
• Guidance: We provided strategic insights and solutions, preparing Mahindra for challenges.
• Flexibility: Adapting to changing requirements was crucial for success.
• Commitment: Our dedication to delivering high-quality results aligned perfectly with Mahindra’s goals.
• Customer-Focus: Our team at Niveus recommended effective improvements and an impressive cost-reduction strategy, keeping in line with our customer-centric approach.