CAT Dealership Significantly Increases Fleet Availability While Decreasing Expenses
Architected an agile data warehouse to support current and new data sources, work with any front end BI tool, and provide accurate, up-to-the minute performance data to Wagner’s executives and branch managers. With metrics aligned across disparate operational sources and having access to interactive KPI dashboards, Wagner realized significant ROI across various aspects of the business.
Challenge
Wagner Equipment Co. operates Caterpillar sales, service and rental offices in three states and oversees and maintains a vast inventory. With operational and customer data stored in different source systems (DBS, Rentalman, Infor), reporting on key performance metrics was neither efficient nor reliable. Identical data was often defined differently, making it impossible to effectively access, extract and report on. Report numbers didn’t line up. The discrepancies created confusion between departments and resulted in time lost to manual calculations. It could take weeks, even a month, to compare data between systems and build a report. Reoccurring and ad hoc reporting was not possible. It was difficult to trend data over time. What’s more, Caterpillar corporate was requesting reports on 150 different metrics on a regular basis.
Wagner wanted to reduce the time and expense of manual reporting and get faster, better visibility into their business. They were looking to get a complete view of their customers and to easily and reliably report on operational KPIs like equipment down time, transportation costs, fleet utilization and discounting.
With an eye to the future, the BI team also requested a solution that would allow their environment to evolve as they took on new technologies and allow them to control and verify origination of data types.
Solution
Senturus architected a full BI stack solution from data warehouse to executive dashboards and automated, self-service reporting. The system gave Wagner agility and fast, universally consistent access to their rental sales and operational metrics.
- Reviewed operational source systems and determined what data was needed and available to support company goals/KPIs.
- Aggregated data from the three source systems, creating a single version of the truth and rationalizing disparate data once and forever.
- Designed the data warehouse to be agnostic of operational sources, allowing data sources to be efficiently added or condensed.
- Provided full support documentation allowing Wagner to independently introduce new data sources in the future as well as fully understand and validate source data.
- Developed data warehouse and models to support any BI tool, allowing Wagner to do reporting in Cognos, Tableau or any other analytics platform.
- Aligned data metrics to match Wagner’s KPIs and business goals and used easily identifiable, common display names.
- Build standardized dashboards that offered a common, reliable view of the business.
- Provide drill-down and roll-up capabilities for metrics.
Benefits
With timely, reliable numbers, the company is able to respond quickly and make adjustments that improve profitability, resulting in
- Reduced fleet turnaround by three days, year over year.
- Managers can view all out-of-commission machines, drilling down to the make, model and specific machine to understand reasons behind interoperability. The result was a significant increase in fleet availability, a reduction in lost sales, and an increase in days on rent of all Wagner’s machines.
- Decreased discounting expenses—comparing the top 10 discounted customers against their spend allowed Wagner to right-size the discount amounts.
- Increased equipment rental profit margins—identified highest value locations for rentals, improving use and transportation cost management.
- Improved high-value customer retention—by tracking customer spend, they know who the highest value customers are, which prevents potential drop-offs.
- Freed up the BI team to work on enterprise-wide reports—end users can build their own reports and data profiles.
- Improved branch performance numbers and drove friendly inter-branch competition—managers can see how they perform relative to other branches, adjusting performance to be competitive, and aiding the overall company profitability.
- Reports are run in hours, not weeks or days—building, maintaining and adjusting reports to reflect changes is easy.
[We saw a three-day reduction of fleet turnaround, year over year.] What that means for us is a significant increase in fleet availability, a reduction in lost sales and an increase in days-on-rent for all of our machines. And if that doesn’t speak for itself, I don’t know what does.
-Jason Harris,
BI Development Manager
About our client
Wagner Equipment Co. is a Caterpillar sales, service and rental dealer with offices in Colorado, New Mexico and West Texas. Since 1976 Wagner has been selling and renting Caterpillar machines used in heavy construction, building construction, waste handling, paving, mining, municipal and governmental application, forestry and more. Wagner prioritizes customer service while boasting a vast inventory to make sure customers get the CAT equipment parts and repair service they require.
