Transurban

Established in 1996, Transurban is an ASX top 20 organisation and a leading provider of infrastructure and transport services, managing and developing toll roads across Australia and parts of the USA in partnership with government clients. Working closely with both commercial and government entities, Transurban addresses complex infrastructure challenges with effective transport solutions and maintains 13 existing major roads in Australia, along with 2 major roads in the Washington DC area in the USA.

The Need

As part of its customer strategy, Transurban needed to increase and further leverage its digital capability in order to meet growing customer demand for new web-based services.

The solution needed to improve the customer experience through the delivery of new content with increased functionality, provide dynamic pages for quicker transactions and response times, deliver internal self-service and manager-owned content in real-time, and convey meaningful data back to Transurban regarding customer behavior when using online services.

Transurban also had a number of existing websites, each running on different platforms and technologies and independently managed by different business units. These technologies needed to be consolidated with a solution that could handle all digital requirements and allow Transurban to be more responsive to customers than was previously possible.

There was also a desire to adopt a more contemporary technology approach.  To leverage DevOps principals and the benefits of CI/CD powered by Amazon Web Services, typically enjoyed by the start-up community, in order to deliver faster & consistently.

Solution

To meet Transurban’s needs, Versent and Deloitte partnered to implement a fully automated, scalable, “powered by DevOps” and intuitive Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Content Management System. The AEM solution resided within Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) native cloud and provided the security needed to meet regulatory requirements, whilst giving the business confidence in knowing that its compliance, risk, and governance were safe and secure in the cloud.

The feature rich AEM product was selected based on a formal product selection process, for its ease of use to the business and market leading digital capabilities. AEM also provided a cloud-fit, contemporary solution that effectively overcame a number challenges Transurban was facing.

Due to AEM being cloud fit it was a natural decision for Transurban to host this solution in the Enterprise Cloud Enablement platform (ECE), which comprised a range of AWS-based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings like EC2, EBS, CloudFront, CloudFormation & SQS. This enabled Transurban to provide a scalable, always available, continuously integrated and continuously deployment offering to its business and its customer. ECE provided the freedom to easily expand out to other offices and markets as needed. Furthermore, by provisioning self-service capability internally, environments were able to be created and managed by users without compromising brand consistency across the business.

The ECE ecosystem allowed Transurban to leverage far more than just traditional compute. Capabilities such as messaging services, caching services, queuing services and the rich suite of backup, replication and snapshotting services enabled the orchestration of AEM. This contemporary architecture & implementation facilitates building nodes, automatically in minutes and ecosystems from scratch in hours.

The inclusion of an automated testing suite within the ECE environment also ensures that every step of automation is building services with accuracy & confidence.  These capabilities also ensured Transurban could leverage “Blue / Green Deployments” to further empower changes across the platform.

“The AEM solution enabled faster provisioning and allowed us to overcome many of our challenges,” said Mithran Naiker, ‎General Manager – Infrastructure & Service Delivery at Transurban. “This solution also helped us to create more engaging content for customers, which was a key requirement for us.”

Benefit

The AEM solution established the framework necessary for Transurban to consolidate its existing digital assets. It also enabled the delivery of new and innovative content to customers through a multitude of channels, including mobile, tablets and PCs. This new capability provided greater brand consistency and internal processes across multiple offices.

“Having a single, centralised Content Management System has given us a solid foundation for rolling out improved digital services to customers,” said Mithran. “This has also allowed us to implement security across the organisation in areas such as budgeting, governance, risk and compliance.”

Internally, many processes have improved bringing consistency to different assets and a strong framework for managing the Transurban brand. Sites are now consolidated, more manageable, and more easily built with no style guide required. The new system also provides an easier transition to adding content with more dynamic pages and insight.

In addition, the business-driven, robust platform caters for unpredictable loads, and also allows for approved staff to spin up test and development environments on demand, rather than having to wait for technical assistance or direction.

“This has given us a greater understanding of what customers are doing when utilising online services,” added Mithran. “Our customers also have a better user experience and are able to self-service, saving us more time which we can dedicate to other resources in the organisation.”

With the content creation process running more efficiently, Transurban is now in the position to deliver content to customers faster than ever before, with new products being more effectively introduced, and training capability and internal intranet services rationalised through a consistent interface.