The Challenge
Easy Access to Real-Time Data and Standardized Dashboards with Snowflake and Tableau
With nearly 40,000 associates across four continents and the largest truck fleet in North America, you can imagine the massive amount of data involved in Penske’s operations. The transportation and logistics leader’s most important assets are its drivers and trucks, and the company needed analytics and reporting that best reflects that.
The Penske team needed an analytics partner to help them streamline their self-service data environment to expedite reporting and provide easier access from its fleet management application. The Penske leadership team was also interested in seeing insights that reflect resource utilization and cost tracking, while providing customers with more visibility into costs and service quality. They chose to partner with Atrium for our industry knowledge and expertise in Snowflake and Tableau.
Corralling the Dashboard Creation Wild West
Penske Logistics was already using Tableau extensively. But while Penske’s data platform team (IT) was putting together some useful Tableau dashboards, the process involved manually extracting reports from SAP Business Objects and incorporating data from disparate Excel files. The team was also inundated with new field requests and questions from users.
Because of the sheer volume of requests, they couldn’t all be handled by IT, so analysts would create their own calculations, reports, and extracts in Tableau. It was a “Wild West” of insights with no clear coordination across different dashboards. Penske needed help to put more standardization in place and make it more intuitive for customers and analysts to access the metrics they care about — without going rogue on custom dashboards.
