Every second counts: Auction leader seeks best-in-class tooling to gain an edge

• Problem: Ritchie Bros. is a global Fortune 400 company transacting $9B+ annually, and the world’s largest auctioneer of commercial assets and vehicles. While they lead the market in heavy equipment sales, their engineering team was slowed by dedicating headcount to managing slow, costly, on-premises CI/CD. Builds took days, blocking innovation, and limiting recruiting appeal.
• Solution: Ritchie Bros. recognized that in order to truly standardize on best practices, they needed CircleCI for best-in-class CI/CD as a pillar of their platform engineering approach, enabling them to cement their market dominance and attract top talent.

As the leading global digital auction house, Ritchie Bros. is in a highly competitive space, transacting billions of dollars of heavy equipment and real estate every year. With digital auctions, the difference of a few seconds can mean millions of dollars, so time and reliability are of the essence. They need to provide sellers and buyers with a fast, performant, and reliable platform. In order for them to stay on top, investing in the technology that powers their business is a top priority.

Creating a developer-friendly feedback loop

Ranbir Chawla, Senior VP of Engineering for Ritchie Bros., joined the company from a global tech consulting agency. There, he had been part of a group advising Ritchie Bros. on their tech stack, surfacing opportunities for innovation through technology. Chawla had already seen the power of CircleCI as a proven solution across other consulting clients:

“I used CircleCI early on and saw it grow,” Chawla says. “It’s not a static solution and the company’s always innovating. We knew CircleCI helped our clients scale up the build environment without having to spend months on building a Kubernetes cluster. When our clients chose CircleCI, they never ran into capacity issues, and the start-up was fast.”

When Chawla moved in-house at Ritchie Bros., he saw the chance to really put CircleCI to work helping the auction company with one of its biggest challenges: attracting the top-tier talent they required to keep pushing their market-leading technology forward.

“We wanted to get the word out about how awesome it is to be here and we wanted top-quality talent,” Chawla says. “Talent wants to show off their work, and get feedback from other people. Engineers want feedback from their customers just like actors want Academy Awards.”

Doubling headcount is no easy task, and they knew that in order to compete for top talent on the engineering market, they needed to offer a preeminent developer experience.

Platform engineering as a competitive advantage

To achieve his vision for Ritchie Bros.’ engineering, Chawla needed to bring in a solution that focused on a high degree of security, flexibility, and power.

“Imagine the worst-case scenario for CI/CD,” Chawla says. “Jenkins was so hard to manage that we needed one person to do that full time. The builds took forever. The servers they ran on were on-premise and expensive. We had different tools depending on different teams, so there was no way anyone learned or got the network effect from anybody else.”

Looking to the future, Chawla knew that choosing best-in-class CI/CD to create an efficient, scalable, and secure platform for his engineering teams was how he would build a competitive technology moat around Ritchie Bros., and saw CircleCI was a prudent investment in Ritchie Bros.’ future success. “We’d rather invest in people who are creative instead of investing in people who have to manage tools,” he adds.

Adoption of CircleCI within Ritchie Bros. spread organically, thanks to viral word-of-mouth amongst development teams. “Engineers look over and ask, ‘What’s that tool you have over there?’” Chawla says. “And they realize, ‘This is a whole lot easier than I thought.’”

Now, one hundred percent of Ritchie Bros.’ cloud-native software projects are built with CircleCI. In addition, CircleCI accelerated the company’s digital transformation to speed up feature development for customers. Says Chawla, “We took 20 years of legacy code and replaced it in seven months.”

Eliminating friction to speed up innovation and build trust

From Chawla’s standpoint, the investment in CircleCI has had a significant impact on reducing friction – one of the enemies of speed and product quality in any organization. “We care about the waste in our value stream,” Chawla says.

By using CircleCI, developers have shortened workflows from as long as two days to just 20 minutes, tightening feedback loops. “If we see something, we can fix it even before it affects customers,” Chawla says. “The fast feedback loops build trust in our business.”

A “kickass” developer experience

With CircleCI in place, Chawla and the Ritchie Bros. developers now have “the most kickass platform-engineering environment that I’ve ever seen,” he says. “That’s not what you’d normally think of in a company where you’re selling trucks.”

How does Chawla define kickass? “There’s zero friction to get started with CircleCI,” he says.

“The learning curve is low. There are repeatable patterns for developers to use. There are guardrails so devs can experiment safely. We have all the resiliency and scale that you could possibly need. It’s the best of everything.”

As with any technology investment, the company’s adoption of CircleCI needs to pay off beyond engineering. For Chawla, that payoff is about Ritchie Bros.’ customers trusting the platform with the most valuable assets in their business - equipment and real estate. “We’re giving customers a new website that looks exactly like the old one but performs better,” he says. “It’s more resilient. It doesn’t stop an auction.”

“With the old website and with Jenkins, it took two days to make a build and release it,” Chawla explains. “Now we get a feedback loop from customer service, and the change goes up in 20 minutes. And just like that, our business agility improves, and our customers can see that.”

“This is one of the last industries to go digital,” Chawla says of the heavy equipment auction space. “We have an advantage if we’re able to get there faster.”

No matter what industry you’re in, shoring up your tech stack remains one of the best investments you can make in securing a competitive advantage. In today’s market, minutes — even seconds — matter. Speed of innovation and software reliability can mean the difference between new deals and customer churning. How do you ensure quality code that gets released faster? By powering innovative engineering teams with best-in-class software.

Says Chawla, “whoever doesn’t get there faster will get beaten.”

About Ritchie Bros.

Ritchie Bros. is the world’s largest auctioneer of commercial assets and vehicles offering online bidding. To standardize on best practices, they chose CircleCI for best-in-class CI/CD as a pillar of their platform engineering approach.