DAF Used Trucks is the department in charge of managing and remarketing trucks returned from finance and lease contracts, operating under PACCAR Financial Europe. They are collaborating with Xomnia to bring all the data that they collect, generate and use into a single source of truth (SSOT). We are also working to integrate this SSOT with their new asset management system and eCommerce platform.
The project, which started in June 2022, is being currently taken to production. Xomnia’s consultants will also extend the data platform with AI-based decision support and analytics solutions.
"Working together with Xomnia on a shared understanding of the challenges is key to the successful development of a single source of truth."- Eke van Riel, Senior IT Project Manager DAF Used Trucks
Challenge
The journey that a used truck undergoes within DAF Used Trucks, also known as the 'Used Truck Process,' spans many steps and stakeholders, each of which come with their own databases and platforms. This includes information about the trucks themselves, the types of truck lease contracts, data from and about different leasing dealerships, sensor data from the vehicles, the status of the truck in the used truck journey (returned, leased, sold, etc.), among others.
“We wanted to replace the landscape of the current systems to accommodate our fast growth over the past 5 years”, says Eke van Riel, Senior IT Project Manager DAF Used Trucks. “To arrive to a solution, we knew that we had to combine multiple sources and set-up a real-time streaming cloud solution, for some or even all the sources if need be,” she explains.
With this in mind, DAF Used Trucks approached Xomnia to switch to a more data-driven way of working with the help of our expertise, starting from setting data strategies all the way to executing them.
Solution
A team of Xomnia’s consultants started the project by creating asset management and eCommerce data strategies for DAF Used Trucks. Based on these strategies, they launched the first part of the project, aimed at building a data infrastructure that will make the whole organization shift to a data-driven way of working.
“The new platform should help solve the scattering of data, prevent the need for manual uploads of databases, support automated tasks and notifications based on business process steps and offer the chance to grow towards data-driven and personalized marketing,” says Van Riel.
This infrastructure is a single source of truth (SSOT) where data coming from the different sources of the Used Truck Process are processed, cleaned, synchronized and stored using Apache Kafka, Spark Streaming and others. Data is imported and exported continuously between the SSOT and workflow management systems, e-commerce platforms, inspector interfaces, marketing tools, and other platforms involved in the used truck process. This, in turn, allows all stakeholders to do their job more efficiently, easily and accurately.
An array of API’s and Kafka connectors created by Xomnia’s consultants integrate the SSOT with all the different systems used by DAF Used Trucks’ internal and external stakeholders. Altogether, the data platform runs on AWS cloud, but is set up in a cloud agnostic manner. The platform will traverse different operations at the client, impacting multiple business applications that will rely on it, and that cannot happen without it operating in real-time.
Additionally, Xomnia helped build a truck pricing module on top of our platform, which currently utilizes business rules and pricing models to come up with the right price for a truck. In the future, this model can be further extended with smart/dynamic pricing capabilities.
Impact
The platform is currently being put in production. Once live, it bwill be used by DAF Used Trucks in all its markets in Europe.
After the platform is in production, Xomnia’s consultants will add analytics and decision support use cases on top of it, eventually building AI and machine learning models to turn the data into useful insights ( i.e. dynamic pricing, recommender systems, data-driven lead scoring, etc).
All in all, this will help the client to become the market leading online e-commerce platform for DAF Used Trucks by:
- Improving parameter setting, segmentation and price optimization based on performance and market data,
- providing the most complete set of relevant information about trucks, and
- giving users the best user experience through data-driven functionalities like recommendations and easy-to-load data.
Stay tuned for more updates on this project.