How Europcar Streamlined API Management with Automation

Founded in 1949, Europcar began as a small rental car company in Paris. Over the last 70 years, Europcar has expanded to over 140 countries and serves millions of customers worldwide. Europcar is one of the main brands in the European Mobility Group (EMG or EMobG), Europcar has a fleet of 256,000 vehicles and employs more than 9,000 employees. In 2022, Europcar was acquired by the Volkswagen Group Consortium.

Due to Europcar's massive outreach across the globe, unifying control of APIs throughout all branches was a challenge. They were looking to streamline the API management process across all brands, systems, and regions to optimize their business and remove the inefficiencies between disconnected systems. 

Security standards varied across the board depending on the branch. Without standardized API management, it became difficult to manage the various APIs and anticipate any issues that may arise. And when something did go wrong, troubleshooting became an ordeal.

The newly formed API engineering team was given the difficult undertaking of streamlining the API process across the many parts of the company and needed to find a simple and effective way to unify the management process.

Kong Konnect was implemented to unifiy Europcar’s many systems. Kong Konnect allowed Europcar to easily connect all their Software as a Service (SaaS) content with any cloud/containerization applications. 

Using the Admin API function of Kong Konnect, the team was able to easily document their APIs and publish them to developer portals, allowing APIs to be treated as a products.

With Kong Insomnia, Europcar created a continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline and is able to generate declarative configuration from OpenAPI specifications. 

With decK, the team was able to automate API documentation. The updating of the APIs through this new automated process is independent and intuitive, so users don’t need to input any additional changes or information. The result? More robust and consistent APIs.

With Kong, the team at Europcar and EMobG noticed several significant benefits to their company. 

• Move to cloud — Kong Konnect encouraged and aided in the team’s move to the cloud
• Set security standards and adopt best practices —  The streamlining of the API gateway and management process made it simple and effective to set security standards and best practices throughout all branches and systems. 
• Enable a developer portal — The developer portal implemented allowed for the seamless documentation and cataloging of all issues, changes, and usages. 
• Centralized observability and monitoring — Centralization of the monitoring and observing process for APIs made the system much more convenient and intuitive. 
• Delegated API exposure to project teams — Delegating specific APIs to specific teams became much easier to organize and keep track of.