Modernizing Warehouse Management at Crown

Background

Pioneering Resilient, Scalable Solutions in Warehouse Management

Crown Equipment, a global leader in forklift manufacturing and warehouse management solutions, embarked on a journey to modernize its operations in preparation for automated, driverless forklifts and advanced warehouse management. To achieve this, Crown needed to transition from traditional development approaches to agile methodologies, reduce operational inefficiencies, and enhance the resilience and scalability of its applications. Crown partnered with RightBrain Networks (RBN) to drive these changes, leveraging RBN’s cloud expertise and agile enablement.

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Challenge

Breaking Free from Traditional Architectures

As Crown prepared for automated warehouse management, it faced several technical and operational challenges:

Organizational Shift to Agile: While Crown had engaged an Agile coach, its large organizational structure made it difficult to uniformly implement Agile practices across teams.
Legacy Monolithic Architecture: Crown’s warehouse management applications were monolithic, limiting scalability and resilience. This architecture posed a significant roadblock in Crown’s vision of nimble, automated solutions.
Long Release Cycles: Due to the monolithic design and traditional development processes, Crown faced extended periods between new releases, hindering their ability to respond quickly to business needs.

Solution

Agile Transformation and Microservices Architecture

RBN collaborated with Crown to dismantle their legacy architecture, streamline development processes, and embed Agile methodologies across teams. Key initiatives included:

Transition to Microservices: RBN deconstructed Crown’s monolithic application into microservices, containerized through Docker, allowing more granular load balancing and significantly enhancing scalability and resilience.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC): RBN implemented AWS CloudFormation to define, deploy, and manage Crown’s architecture, creating consistent, immutable environments that reduced human error and simplified management.
Automated CI/CD Pipelines: RBN established CI/CD pipelines to automate deployments and enforce best practices, significantly accelerating development cycles while maintaining high standards across the board.
Agile Enablement and Training: Working closely with Crown’s teams, RBN provided guidance on Agile methodologies, fostering a culture of iterative development and continuous improvement to support rapid, adaptive growth.

Outcome

Scalable, Agile-Driven Modernization

The collaboration with RBN led to transformative improvements in Crown’s warehouse management systems and development practices:

Resilient, Scalable Architecture: The shift to a microservices-based architecture empowered Crown to scale its applications seamlessly, supporting resilience and readiness for driverless warehouse management.
Immutable Infrastructure Across Environments: Implementing infrastructure as code improved governance, minimized manual errors, and allowed Crown to manage environments consistently across development, testing, and production.
Accelerated Development and Deployment Cycles: Crown’s adoption of Agile methodologies, coupled with automated CI/CD pipelines, resulted in more frequent and incremental updates, reducing time to market and enabling quicker responses to business demands.

This strategic partnership has positioned Crown to lead in the automated warehouse industry, equipped with a flexible, resilient system that’s primed for the future of driverless technology and modern warehouse management.

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