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.
Consistent and Timely Insights with Snowflake and Tableau
With Atrium’s help, the Penske team was able to create a more efficient, consistent, and intelligent experience for customers through a self-service data framework, while freeing up their IT team to focus on more high-value work.
The Atrium project team did so by migrating product data sources from legacy Business Objects Universes (BOU) into Snowflake, combining existing data in Snowflake, and ultimately converting BOUs into Tableau data sources that connect to Snowflake.
The new process involves building Certified Tableau Data Sources from the data in the Snowflake Cloud data warehouse. These data sources are curated and data dictionaries are available to ensure the elements are easily understood by users. Now, all users can access the same easy-to-understand data, which allows for more dashboard standardization and less customization.
The team also optimized the process of Tableau dashboard configuration by leveraging the Snowflake connector in Tableau, providing more up-to-date information and enabling better-informed decisions for Penske Fleet Manage clients.
The Penske team now has a standardized process with a templated customer metrics dashboard they can provide to all new customers. Atrium helped them eliminate redundant data sources and systems and enabled their business teams to more seamlessly access and share data, accelerating insights while reducing friction and the workload for IT.
The Atrium team has been fantastic to work with. Our business is not easy to learn and they have taken the time to understand it and have been a critical part of our success in starting this initiative.
Data Governance, Centers of Excellence, and Laying the Foundation for Scalable Self-Service Analytics
The Atrium team also helped Penske strategize governance and establish centers of excellence to manage how data products are created and consumed in the organization. And through our strategic approach to building systems of intelligence, we helped them lay the foundation for a more mature data strategy with full self-service analytics.
“The Atrium team has been fantastic to work with,” said Vishwa Ram, Vice President of Data Science & Analytics at Penske. “Our business is not easy to learn and they have taken the time to understand it and have been a critical part of our success in starting this initiative.”
