Neudesic + Railcar Manufacturer
Building a Modern Fleet Management System on Azure to Optimize Routes, Drive Predictive Maintenance, & Reduce Downtime
Project Highlights
Data Modernization & Governance
Successful Azure Synapse, Microsoft Purview and Profisee Implementation
4-Year
Digital Transformation Initiative on Azure
Quick Stats
Industry: Transportation & Logistics
Organization Size: 1,685 employees
Annual Revenue: $30M
Solution: Data & AI Platform Accelerator with Azure
Organization Location: Chicago, IL
Challenge:
A large North American railcar and freight car management services company sought a partner to help drive their digital transformation. The company is dispersed over North America with over 165,000 cars and intermodal wells – supports shippers in the intermodal, automotive, paper, forest, metals, machinery, wind energy, and other markets.
The digital transformation plan will focus on moving their fleet management systems into the cloud. Their existing UFD fleet management system is hosted entirely on premise and has been impacted by datacenter outages that caused critical business interruption, forcing them to invest heavily in redundancy to keep the business operating.
The organization recognized that moving to a modern platform for fleet management would also reduce their expenses, so the team committed to Azure, but needed to start validating that the architectures, governance, and overall performance would meet their business needs.
Solution:
As part of the modernization effort, the organization engaged Neudesic to support and provide guidance related to the implementation of Microsoft Purview to enhance Data Governance and improve Data Quality. The solution included:
- Data Catalog: Data Dictionary in Azure for Devs, Data Stewards & Self Service
- Data Classification: Identify & tag data columns for various rules, both out of the box & custom i.e., PII, PCI, HIPPA, GDPR
- Data Glossary: Created Business Terms to describe business rules, process, description of data, assign to Schemas within Purview
- Deduplication: identify and remove duplicate data
- MDM (via Profisee): Create data matching rules to group together similar rows of data, Identify data quality issues, Selection of “best” record for group of similar records, and create hierarchies within MDM Profisee to establish custom relationships between similar objects
Benefits:
Due to a successful deployment of a modern data platform and data governance strategy for the North American Division, the company plans to implement a global adoption of Microsoft Azure Synapse and Microsoft Purview. So far, the strategy is paying off:
- Governed: Enhances visibility and quality of data through cataloging, management, and automation capabilities of Purview, Profisee, and DevOps
- Flexibility: Offers a variety of innovative big data analytics technologies to easily handle structure, semi-structured, and unstructured data
- Performant: Leverages the massive parallel processing Synapse to ingest, transform, and serve big data
- Scalable: Provides options to scale storage and compute vertically and horizontally though easy to configure PaaS services