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Alteryx at DTNA: Demystifying and Finding Insight in IoT Data

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Overview of Use Case

Daimler Trucks North America, a global leader in vehicle manufacturing, used Alteryx during their digital transformation by incorporating the Internet of Things into their vehicles. Already a core part of their toolkit across various business units, Alteryx made it simple to connect and translate huge amounts of big data to uncover insights for sensor-connected trucks – leading to analysis on fuel economy, safety reporting products, and a suite of other services.

 
Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

In the last few years, DTNA has sold over 40% of the highway class A vehicles. We have brands like Smart or Mercedes-Benz, all the way to heavy class vehicles. Obviously, we manufacture vehicles and we’ve been doing that since the 40’s, but we’ve diversified into other ventures. We’re an aftermarket parts retailer, a service organization through dealers, we do financing for new and used vehicles, and we’re also a technology company.

 

We're connecting hundreds of new trucks every day, creating trillions of rows of data by capitalizing on the Internet of Things (IoT). If you think about a vehicle driving six to eight hours a day for a week, it can generate 29,000 seconds of data for each of its dozens of sensors. That's about 1.5 million seconds of data just for one vehicle per week. Now imagine if you have a team driving 22 hours a day and you have hundreds of thousands of trucks connected. That becomes a lot of data very quickly. As you can imagine, DTNA had a tremendous need for a technology platform built for big data and we found that with Alteryx.

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Describe your working solution

As a company that's very good at building trucks, we're stepping into this IoT connected vehicle world by offering digital services to our customers. One of our key offerings, is a fuel economy service which helps our customers understand driver behavior and what they could be doing to decrease fuel economy. Before Alteryx, it was complicated to manage such a high volume of data, making it difficult to deliver solutions in the most effective way.

 

For our work with the IoT sensors, Alteryx was very influential in database processing and connecting different data sets in one platform. Once formatted and organized, we started seeing tremendous value when aggregating and analyzing our data. Alteryx made visualization easy with spatial tools. By taking a spatial object around a box, we plotted heat maps using the hexagon tool. There's native tools in R to make a heat map or you could also write your own R or Python code.

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Alteryx gives us a complete understanding, from raw data to the end deliverable, all within one platform. We use Designer to build workflows, create macros, and pull or publish data to intelligence tools, while Server aids with repeatable or automated workflows. We don't have to worry about erroneous results or dirty data because our workflows account for that. We're not doing one off analysis anymore. 

 

Alteryx has been a natural fit. It gives our business analysts the ability to connect to the tools IT has already built and work with them to build new solutions to integrate with Alteryx and other tools. We're connecting hundreds of new trucks every day, and with Alteryx, we can stream high granularity insights to support our services.

 
Describe the benefits you have achieved

Alteryx has empowered our organization to utilize massive amounts of data and connect across different platforms, technologies, and teams. It’s being used at DTNA in Marketing, Finance, Operations, and Analytics, enabling our users with the data they need to make business decisions. As we continue our digital transformation, Alteryx will allow us to look forward and help convert traditional business processes. Most organizations have big data, but they don’t have the tools to harness and extract value from it.

 
Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here

 

 
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Comments
74MalibuClassic
5 - Atom

Thanks for sharing this, fun to see how others are using it! 😃

 

Self-service and data quality checks are definitely high marks, I also like the interchangeability/ ease of making changes & maintenance for designer workflows.