Scania Uses Data Mesh and Snowflake’s Data Cloud to Drive Transport Sustainability

Scania is at the forefront of a more autonomous, connected, electric future for the transportation industry. Find out why its Head of Data and Information Management uses data mesh—and Snowflake—to make it a reality.

Scania is a global truck, bus, and industrial engine manufacturer and offers an extensive range of related services so its customers can focus on their core business.

It’s on a mission to drive the shift towards more sustainable transport solutions that benefit the environment and meet the needs of people and society throughout the transport ecosystem. It’s little wonder the company has won the green truck award for the last six years.

In fact, the company already helps businesses looking for autonomous mining solutions embrace an electric future for their vehicles—trialing autonomous mining trucks, which will increase productivity and lower carbon emissions. It’s also part of several e-road consortiums exploring how overhead electric catenary wire can be used to power electric trucks across Europe’s motorway network.

But creating these innovative projects takes more than determination and expertise; it relies on large volumes of high quality data. It’s why Tomas Dersjö, Head of Data and Information Management at Scania focuses on how data fits into the business, including how to extract the most value from it to deliver better and more sustainable solutions for customers.

Scania saw data mesh as a great fit for its business model as it delivers domain-orientated and decentralized data ownership. “This concept—and the way it should be implemented and used—is very similar to what made us successful historically: Modularity,” explained Dersjö.

With a modular approach, Scania can create custom hardware and service solutions tailored to each customer, whether they need to travel through mountainous regions or undertake longer journeys, choosing the most suitable components to create the most cost-effective solution.

“In the future, we’ll have data domains as well,” said Dersjö. “And I think connectivity will be one of, if not the most important areas. A lot of the services we’ll have to develop to make it more attractive to customers are based on data and, typically, operational data from vehicles.”

Scania is a decentralized company that takes a more agnostic approach to data mesh. In this decentralized culture, there has to be freedom of choice. And by giving its people freedom to choose their own platform, Snowflake has grown in popularity across Scania’s departments. 

Scania also uses Snowflake’s collaboration capabilities to encourage collaboration and develop another of its core values—connectivity. Dersjö explained: “We have a few cases already where we have collaborated with external partners and customers through Snowflake, for example, with data monetization—which Snowflake has very nice features for—and through SnowflakeMarketplace.” 

“Snowflake gives us higher productivity. You can get a lot done and extract a lot of value from data,” said Dersjö “For instance, if you want to electrify a fossil-based fleet, there are a whole bunch of things you need to know about the operation. And we have that data. We can use it to help our customers transform into an electrified future.”

This isn’t the only way Scania plans to use operational data to drive sustainability going forward. Getting more insight from this data will help the company optimize charging station locations and establish the minimum number of batteries needed in a given infrastructure to keep customer costs as low as possible.

What started as a few departments choosing Snowflake to optimize their data’s value has turned into a landslide across the many services that Scania offers. “Early adopters have led the way and shown to other domains that it is highly possible to extract a lot of value from data using Snowflake—and now a lot of the other domains are catching on,” explained Dersjö. “When our domains choose freely, they tend to go with Snowflake as their platform because they’ve seen that it’s possible to extract a lot of value using it. And I think we’ll see a lot more of this going forward.”

Learn how you can Knit Your Data Mesh on Snowflake—get the Ebook here.