Scania is a world-leading provider of transport solutions, including trucks and buses for heavy transport applications, combined with an extensive product-related service portfolio. The company also offers vehicle financing, insurance, and rental services, enabling customers to focus on their core business. In addition, Scania is also a leading provider of power solutions for industrial and marine applications.
Together with partners and customers, they are driving the shift towards a sustainable transport system, creating a world of mobility that is better for business, society, and the environment.
As such, service data must be consistent, translated on demand and always available. Yet with such a numerous and dispersed set of partners, languages and locations, and a variety of current and past types and models, Scania still ensures 95% parts availability.
Challenges
Retiring legacy systems and turning data into a strategic asset, not a cost
With decades of development and growth, Scania wanted to turbocharge the data it and its partners collected and shared. The change to a data-driven approach required an overhaul of the company’s approach to collecting, maintaining and sharing data.
With 2,250 dealers and workshops spread across 58 countries, Scania must maintain consistent data about its products and its customers. For example, mechanics servicing a truck driven from Croatia at a workshop in Belgium need to understand exactly which parts are required and have access to the vehicle’s service history to see what has been fixed in the past.
The need to localize and update information constantly and handle input errors by employees and partners remains critical.
A further consideration was the tightening of data governance regulations. While sharing data between Scania, business partners and customers delivers huge value, it must be done in strict compliance with the law. Specifically, compliance with GDPR meant Scania needed to democratize access to data entry and retrieval while managing the risks of having personal information across multiple regions and jurisdictions.
From Scania’s perspective, achieving a single version of its customer information would lower administrative costs, address regulatory compliance obligations and allow information to be managed on a global basis.
Customers and partners would also benefit from clear privacy guidelines and a better view of the products and services on offer. On top of this, partners would be better placed to service the needs of customers whose vehicles, by their very nature, regularly travel enormous distances across borders and regions.
Critical to the success of this would be the creation of a Data Steward Network by Scania in the form of 4,000 service advisors who could improve and correct the quality of the data Scania handled on an ongoing basis.
“We have 2,250 dealers all over the world and that explains why we need to master our customer information. Trucks are driving around and through multiple countries, so we must hold a master version of the data for the customer, regardless of where their vehicles are at any time.” - Jenny Albrektsson, Project Manager, Scania
Scania’s legacy infrastructure was heavily coded, reducing flexibility and access, and ripe for replacement with a modern master data management (MDM) platform. A renewed, up-to-date MDM would be the foundation on which Scania could build a configurable, user-friendly web-based solution for business partners.
As a business-critical transformation project, the program attracted a lot of attention and a lot of questions. The team knew that clear communication would be critical.
“Our stakeholders used different technologies and techniques to get and update data. At the same time, the MDM needed to enable a 360° view of the customer. The ambition was to have a holistic view of customers and a single source of truth, increasing their retention and levels of satisfaction.” - Robert Ciborowski, QING MDM Solution Manager, Scania
Scania dubbed the new project QING, a name with multiple meanings. As a mnemonic, it stands for Quality Information Globally. In Mandarin, ‘qing’ means pure, clear or clean. Fittingly, one of Scania’s most powerful trucks – the 770 horsepower V8 – is nicknamed “King of the Road.”
To summarize, Scania was experiencing the following challenges:
- Multiple legacy systems that could not meet the modern demands of data scientists, business partners, users and customers, and which lacked a single version of the truth
- Highly mobile products that needed to be maintained and serviced wherever they were in the world
- Privacy, customs and data security regulations across 58 countries that were increasingly detailed and placed a responsibility on the company to balance data access and usability with data governance and compliance
- Over a dozen first-line stakeholder groups, all with different requirements, involvements and responsibilities
Solution
Executing a global customer data modernization strategy at scale
Scania worked with integration partner LTIMindtree and Stibo Systems to implement Business Partner Data Cloud, replacing a number of legacy systems and providing a deep, robust connection with Scania’s existing ERP, finance and CRM systems.
The team set an ambitious target: decommission the old platform within a year. This required many projects to run in parallel, which demanded, in turn, strong project management skills from Scania, Stibo Systems, and LTIM Mindtree.
The outcome delivered a complete, unified view of Scania’s business partners, harmonizing the company’s business-to-business customer data across all access points and enabling more personalized customer engagement. The MDM achieves this by standardizing and integrating customer records and establishing a single source of truth for the company and its partners.
These improvements have enhanced operational efficiencies, reduced redundancies and inconsistencies in customer data, and ultimately boosted customer retention and satisfaction.
The project resulted in a better understanding of how data errors occurred – and opened up the correction process to service partners, so they could question and correct errors, and Scania could understand error patterns that could then be corrected or accounted for.
Behind the headline was a lot of complexity: over 80 active integrations to connect Business Partner Data Cloud to Scania’s ERP platforms, as well as external providers such as Dun & Bradstreet.
Key technologies and integrations to Stibo Systems’ solution included Collibra for data governance, Confluent Kafka for real-time event streaming and data integration, Snowflake’s data warehouse technology built on Amazon AWS, and Microsoft’s PowerBI to pull interactive reports and dashboards.
In a bid to democratize data access, the entire workflow is built for user self-service. On the topic of democratization Scania also took the step of creating an internal “green zone,” where employees could access detailed and specific data freely while remaining compliant with data protection laws including GDPR.
“We looked, at the simplest level, at the pain points in the business that management would also see and solved them. These were challenges, daily duties, areas where it is difficult to resolve data conflicts, and areas of the business where someone wants to improve something. We have to put the customer in the center of the process, not the product.” - Robert Ciborowski, QING MDM Solution Manager, Scania
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Summary
Happy customers, empowered partners and employees, and regulatory harmony
The QING MDM project has changed the game for Scania and its partners. The organization can now identify duplicate records and consolidate customer information that was once scattered across many systems and regions. It can merge this information into a single golden record, enrich it with external partner data and provide clear updates on when and why the data has changed.
In practical terms, this means Scania and its business partners can now monitor and clean millions of records each day. With better data quality, Scania has strengthened its compliance process, improved its understanding of customers’ needs and requirements, and accelerated its decision-making processes.
