Ryder Increases Data Usage to Fuel Data-Driven Decisions and Its Transformation Journey

Ryder sought to make data more accessible for enterprise users and teams across hundreds of locations, but its on-premises data warehouse was difficult to scale, costly to maintain and approaching end-of-life status.

Increased demand for data and analytics was leading to performance challenges. “Our environment had scalability constraints limiting our ability to centralize our data ecosystem,” says Abhishek Shah, Director, Enterprise Data Services at Ryder. 

Scaling storage and compute to keep pace with Ryder’s growing data needs would have required a significant capital investment and technical effort. According to Shah, “With more and more demand for data, we were limited in onboarding additional users to that platform and were forced to focus processing on early morning data loads impacting users queries performance.”

Migrating to Snowflake’s Data Cloud™ put Ryder in a better position to democratize data. Snowflake’s multi-cluster shared data architecture and near-infinite scaling of storage and compute helped Ryder overcome performance challenges while supporting substantially more data, users and workloads. 

“With Snowflake, we’re able to ingest data from new sources in less time without worrying about capacity,” Shah says. Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Snowflake Marketplace enabled instant, secure access to live data and reduced the cost of some customer and supplier integrations.

Using Snowflake to support new data lake workloads delivered additional efficiencies for Ryder. “We’ve seen data security, accessibility and performance improvements with Snowflake,” says Maria-Victoria Gonzalez, Senior Director, Enterprise Data & Analytics and Data Management at Ryder. “Time to market is also faster with some of the ELT patterns we’ve established.”

Snowflake’s ability to work with a wide array of industry-leading tools and technologies streamlined data access for Ryder’s technical and business teams. According to Shah, “Snowflake makes it easier to provide connectivity so users can access their data more easily.” Snowflake’s governance features and usage-based pricing offered transparency as Ryder onboarded more data-driven use cases, while the platform’s fully managed infrastructure and near-zero maintenance freed up resources for increasing analytics—without requiring a dedicated DBA.

Re-architecting on Snowflake equips Ryder with a scalable, cost efficient data environment that increases access to data across the organization. “With Snowflake’s scalability, we can easily store more data domains in our data lakehouse, without significant upfront investments,” Gonzalez says. “Snowflake has been instrumental to our data democratization strategy.” 

Reports and dashboards keep corporate and maintenance staff informed about key metrics. “Snowflake has become a buzzword internally. Everybody wants to know what it is, what data it can provide, and how to integrate with it,” Shah says.

Ryder uses Snowflake Secure Data Sharing to accelerate data-driven collaboration internally and with data vendors. During a recent POC, Ryder also used Snowflake to share data with one of its part suppliers. According to Shah, “Snowflake’s data sharing has simplified, expedited and reduced total cost of ownership for some of the solutions we’ve built.”

Efficiently unifying and securely sharing marketing insights with Snowflake also allows technical staff to support more requests, ultimately accelerating revenue growth across the business.

With Snowflake, Ryder’s unplanned data outages occur 33% less often, and latency events have essentially dropped to zero. Reducing downtime and latency helps Ryder avoid work stoppages and unnecessary friction with customers.

Ryder increasingly and consistently meets its key data SLAs, allowing users to have the necessary data and insights at the right time to advance corporate objectives. According to Shah, “Reliable performance is helping us reduce contention and processing delays, which have been instrumental in meeting business SLAs.”

Using Snowflake to store and analyze more data will make it easier to support additional data-driven initiatives. Making Snowflake the single source of truth for RyderShare, Ryder’s digital platform for real-time supply chain visibility, could lead to lower TCO, fewer data discrepancies and less complexity. 

Expanding Ryder’s use of Snowflake Secure Data Sharing and Snowflake Marketplace is also on the roadmap. “We’re looking to expand use because it’s definitely easier and more secure, and eliminates a lot of manual processes,” Shah says.

Snowflake Unistore could provide a convenient solution for managing Ryder’s transactional data. According to Shah, “Snowflake has the capability to run both types of workloads—analytical as well as operational. We want to find out if this can help us expand on the operational side, too.”