How Scania is Driving Logistical Efficiency and Sustainability with Big Data

How Scania is Driving Logistical Efficiency and Sustainability with Big Data

Organizations in the transportation and manufacturing industries are applying Industrial IoT concepts and technology to transform product development, supply chains, and manufacturing operations. Scania is driving logistical efficiency and sustainability with big data.

Scania is a world-leading provider of transport solutions and is leading the shift towards sustainable transport systems. In 2018 it delivered 88,000 trucks, 8,500 buses as well as 12,800 industrial and marine engines to customers. From its creation in 1891, Scania has seen the transportation industry mature and is anticipating the next phase of evolution as companies seek to be more sustainable in the systems they use.

The company was looking to make operations as efficient as possible, understand exactly where the inefficiencies lie, and consequently how to solve the problems causing them. Having already set out a clear strategy for becoming a connected business, Scania was ahead of the curve in terms of gathering insights through data analysis. It needed to move towards a data-driven mindset to make use of the information coming from the 300,000-strong connected fleet. Scania saw the need of creating a data product with the ability to transform position data into business insights in a reproducible, reliable and scalable way. This was beyond the capability of traditional ways of working with data and new processing paradigms and tooling were needed.

Providing a foundation for sustainability

Scania realized that simply collecting petabytes of data doesn’t automatically generate value. The company saw the need for transforming position data from its fleet into business insights in a way that was both scalable and repeatable. Scania worked with Cloudera to implement a data platform to facilitate cross-functional collaboration between the business, data scientists and data engineers. Additionally, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark were used for data processing to translate the desired business outcome into data language. Now the company has a verifiable, reliable and repeatable streaming big data application.

“Data has become the vehicle that takes us from problem to solution, and the data lake, processing and data science team have worked with us to build a ‘map’ that can turn this into a reality. The ability to tap into data, trends and insights is truly powerful and promises to be the foundation for our sustainability mission long into the future,” said Sara Björklund, strategy and business development manager at Scania Group.

While data can be analyzed and processed, it doesn’t mean much without the proper context of why it has been selected. Scania was able to gather those within the business that understood the problem and outcome they needed, with those that could manipulate the relevant data to achieve mission-critical business outcomes. By jointly analysing seemingly disparate datasets such as truck size, location and time, for example, the company can paint the most accurate picture to adequately inform prompt decision making, whether it is a case of deploying a certain type of truck or creating a diversion to the route based on live streaming traffic information. This created a much more efficient and sustainable model of analysis, development and improvement.

For more customer use cases visit: https://www.cloudera.com/about/customers.html

Matt Spillar
Customer Programs Manager
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