Volkswagen Group of America (VWGoA)

Overview

Working with Volkswagen Group of America over multiple years, this engagement centered on building and modernizing a Customer Service Center search platform supporting both the Volkswagen and Audi brands. The system was designed for internal users—service center staff, support agents, and technical teams—who needed fast, reliable access to technical documentation, service bulletins, wiring diagrams, training materials, and incident records. The initiative began as a traditional enterprise search deployment and evolved into a broader effort to replatform and future‑proof VWGoA’s internal search architecture, ensuring it could scale with changing platforms, content systems, and security requirements.

The Challenge

VWGoA’s service organizations relied on a large and growing set of disparate enterprise systems, each containing critical but siloed information. Customer service representatives needed to quickly find accurate answers, yet content lived across:

Multiple VW and Audi content repositories
Technical and service documentation systems
Incident and service center records
Training and internal knowledge sources

The challenge was not simply indexing content, but delivering a unified, trusted search experience that worked reliably in a high‑pressure customer service environment, while meeting strict enterprise security and access control requirements.

Additionally, the platform needed to be designed with vendor and technology transitions in mind, avoiding tight coupling to a single search technology.

Solution

I served as Managing Architect and Lead Developer, responsible for overall system architecture, integration strategy, and delivery. The solution focused on building a centralized enterprise search platform for VWGoA’s Customer Service Centers, with an emphasis on:

Robust connector‑based ingestion from multiple enterprise systems
Structured handling of highly technical content (service manuals, wiring diagrams, bulletins)
Secure intranet search aligned with VWGoA’s authentication and authorization models
An architecture designed to support future search replatforming initiatives

Over time, this included work related to search replatforming and connector migration, ensuring continuity of service as underlying technologies evolved. The work included:

Designing the overall enterprise search architecture for VW and Audi service organizations
Developing and managing custom connectors for multiple internal data sources
Supporting secure, role‑based access to sensitive service and technical content
Guiding platform transition and migration strategies to reduce long‑term technical risk

Technologies Used

Enterprise Search Platforms (Google Search Appliance and Elasticsearch)
Java
ManifoldCF
Enterprise Authentication and security integrations

Results

The solution delivered a production‑grade Customer Service Center search platform used by internal VW and Audi teams to support daily service operations. It improved access to critical technical information, reduced friction for support staff, and established a search architecture that could evolve over time, rather than becoming a single‑vendor dead end.

The success of this initial project helped Google expand to VW in Europe.