CIO interview: Steve O’Connor, Aston Martin

For a spy, James Bond’s choice of an Aston Martin is anything but subtle, yet the car and the fictional spook have become synonymous with each other.

Since the 1960s, Aston Martin has upheld an image of style and exclusivity, bolstered by its association with the Bond franchise. But as the automotive industry races towards a new era, Aston Martin has had to evolve, much like Bond, and embrace change. 

Today, the company is responding to broader industry shifts, such as rising trade barriers hindering supply chains and keeping EV prices high, as well as growing competition and volatile trade in markets such as China. In September, Aston Martin and several other large car brands issued profit warnings.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Global new vehicle sales are expected to reach a record 97.2 million units by 2025, with electric vehicles (EVs) leading at a 16% growth rate to 19.4 million units, according to a recent Economist Intelligence Unit report. It is much-needed positive news for the industry. 

For Aston Martin, which appointed former Bentley Motors chairman Adrian Hallmark as CEO earlier this year, this will only be of some comfort. It operates in a highly personalised, high-end area of the market where costs can easily spiral out of control and where, increasingly, technology choices can have a determining role. 

Speaking at Infor’s recent European conference in Amsterdam, CIO Steve O’Connor talks about the completion of an IT transformation and the need for efficiency (unsurprisingly), but it was envisioning a “software-defined car of the future” that he says has shaped the company’s current thinking, especially when it came data, parts and asset management. 

Aston Martin has been working with enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider Infor for about four years now, but unlike many suppliers that approach transformation, Aston Martin went for more of a rip-and-replace approach – usually the stuff of IT consultant nightmares. Much of this was down to its own Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) platform the company had built about 20 years ago. 

O’Connor says “trying to maintain it and keep the thing alive just became way more complex” and it didn’t adhere to industry best practice. In short, it was due an overhaul, but what made it even more pressing was the pressure building on meeting changing needs within the industry. 

“The big driver is obviously the future of automotive,” he says, talking about the need to embrace EVs and how technology is now part and parcel of making cars and in-car experiences.

Aston Martin’s electrification strategy was recently awarded £9m of government funding through the Advanced Propulsion Centre UK (APC), so it’s well on the road to developing its own EV platform, but that’s not what O’Conner is concerned about. It is the customisations or personalisation of each purchase that creates some of the biggest challenges for Aston Martin’s supply chain, logistics and product managers. 

O’Connor talks about the complexity of handling parts at Aston Martin, noting, for example, that a sun visor alone could have almost 3,000 different permutations. This, says O’Connor, adds significant complexity to the manufacturing and supply chain process. “No two Aston Martins are truly alike, even among dealer-spec cars,” he says.

Customisation extends down to specific details such as stitching colour, leather options and carpet choices, making the planning, processes and management of parts a real headache and open to error. The same can sometimes be said of highly customised legacy ERP installations. So, how does Aston Martin work with Infor? 

O’Connor talks about “extensibility” and “modular customisations” being key to the company’s ongoing plans and why it decided to transform its entire system and processes.

Aston Martin is using Infor’s LN software, the core ERP system for manufacturing in the software provider’s CloudSuite Automotive. It’s also using a range of other Infor tools, including Warehouse Management, Supply Chain Planning and Inform CPQ (configure, price, quote). 

“We now have a fully connected ecosystem, starting with the configurator on the website and integrating with Salesforce and CPQ,” says O’Connor, adding that the IT team can do ERP customisations without affecting the core processes of the business, thanks to the modular approach of the software. “We’ve yet to see anything break through that extensibility, which in my experience is actually quite phenomenal.” 

The ERP system handles stock keeping unit (SKU)-level detail and tracks attributes down to specifics like stitching colour and leather type, says O’Connor, enabling a level of granular tracking that will have to be the norm for the business if it is to continue to compete, while at the same time streamlining its supply chain and becoming more resilient in the face of new challenges such as skills gaps.