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Programmers Helps Car Rental Company

Consolidate High-Quality Data on Nearly 100,000 Vehicles in Only 6 Months

Companies with tens of thousands of assets need fast, reliable information to properly make sense of their complex ecosystem. Using our Agile Experience method, we streamlined how one car rental company consumes, processes, and presents information for better business outcomes.

Our client is a car rental company that connects customers with the vehicles they need and offers monthly rental subscriptions. They also help asset owners rent out their vehicles as a secondary revenue source. 

Combined, the company has almost 100,000 vehicles being rented, driven, and returned by customers daily. The organization needs up-to-date information on each of these cars to schedule maintenance, decide when to remove a vehicle from circulation, strategize future asset acquisitions, and more.

Before working with Programmers, the car rental company had a slow and unreliable data platform. The organization knew this prevented them from making decisions with high-quality information and served as a major roadblock in their larger journey to becoming data-driven.

We helped this client by building an advanced analytics platform with Azure Synapse. Using our streamlined Agile Experience process, we deployed the solution in just six months. Now, employees throughout the company can find the insights they need on any vehicle. Learn how we made this solution possible and how the Agile Experience accelerated the time to value below. 

Parking lot of a car rental company

Outlining Business Needs

Before delving into the technology, it was important for us to know what information our client most needed about their vehicles. That way, we could ensure our solution consumed, sorted through, and presented the most vital data.

After sitting down with our client’s leaders, we discovered five key data points that they needed fast, reliable access to:

1. Total value of each car
2. Age of vehicle
3. Length of time on standby
4. Current odometer reading
5. Quantity of cars at each rental location

This information would help the rental company understand how much longer they could leverage each of their vehicles and the current condition of each asset. It would also allow them to target and address rental facilities with too many or an insufficient number of cars.

Our Agile Experience process always begins with an in-depth consultation with the client, ensuring development remains focused on real business needs. Then, we provide the tools, teams, coaching, and agile methodologies that help our clients reach their goals.

Building a Reliable Platform

Before working with Programmers, the car rental company depended on Qlik Sense for data consumption and QlikView for data visualization. This solution’s extract, transform, and load (ETL) process was slow and often produced unreliable data. The company needed a system that would provide fast, accurate information that business users could easily understand.

Knowing that our client needed both historical data, such as the year each car was produced, and real-time data, such as current odometer reading, we built both a data lake and data warehouse using Azure. Within the data lake, our solution ingested information via Azure Synapse pipelines and processed the data with Apache Spark. 

Car rental company CIO reviewing data solution on tablet
Cars driving through a downtown highway at night

Once processed, the information would move on to the data warehouse. We built this warehouse using Dedicated SQL pool features within Azure Synapse Analytics. It is a massively parallel processing (MPP) database, allowing the system to rapidly ingest information coming from multiple sources. 

Within six months, the data lake and warehouse were live, giving employees a single source of truth for decision-making. Our client was thrilled with the data’s accuracy and the solution’s fast deployment. 

The quick turnaround time was possible thanks to our Agile Experience process, which ensured our client had the right teams and tools on day one. Plus, the Agile Experience’s bi-monthly coaching sessions gave stakeholders a clear overhead view of development and kept everyone focused on the most important business needs.

Helping Business Users and Boosting Data Governance

One of the most important parts of this initiative was making sure business users could easily find and sort through the information they needed. This would make the organization more data-driven from top to bottom. 

We created a data catalog with Microsoft Purview that allowed business users to find information by searching for a specific car, metric, or data set. All the information that the company consumes about its vehicles is documented in the catalog, giving business users confidence that the data they are seeing is complete and up to date.

Leveraging Microsoft Purview also helped us boost our client’s data governance. The company’s data scientists use this catalog to track the lineage of each data set, understanding where it currently resides, where it originally came from, and any changes made to it along the way.

Travelers stopping rental car to figure out route

Agile Experience and the Journey to Becoming Data-Driven

Across industries, organizations are looking to add new platforms and tools that empower their leaders to make data-driven decisions. Our Agile Experience approach not only ensures a fast time to value but also keeps development focused on real business needs. It combines industry-leading agile methodologies with the customized teams, tools, metrics, and coaching you need throughout development. Learn more about the Agile Experience and our full suite of data analytics services.

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