Fortude, a global enterprise and digital services company, recently collaborated with Spot to develop a robust data platform to support its future growth plans. The platform will support standardized data, streamline processes, and deliver analytics and insights to decision-makers.

Spot, a leading third-party logistics company in North America, offers innovative, customized solutions, connecting just-in-time shippers with its extensive carrier network. Given the scale and complexity of its network, Spot required a specialty analytics platform with near real-time access to core business information. The information will be used to devise a holistic data strategy and technology approach.

Fortude first conducted a health assessment to review Spot’s data estate, reporting and analytics processes, and overall adoption of analytics. “We realized that our initial data management tool needed attention in more ways than one,” said Ben Garvin, Director of Information Technology at Spot. “Prior to consulting with Fortude, we could only use the available data to generate reports and not derive business insights. Moreover, our data scientists spent a lot of their time cleaning and standardizing available data while we were unable to customize our teams’ access to it. With Fortude’s expertise and support, we set up a data management and analytics platform based on Microsoft Azure’s data services. It leverages Azure Data Lake Gen2, Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse Analytics and Machine Learning along with Power BI for enterprise data models and analytics.”

Spot’s teams can now view key business insights on dashboards, with self-serve analytics to build their reports and understand the implications of their business’ performance metrics. Additionally, they can perform predictive analysis using reliable, standardized data, and obtain near real-time analytics. The data can help the Spot teams identify and rectify inefficiencies that add to operational costs, helping save significant costs over time. The company has also observed that its data scientists spend up to 60-70% less time cleaning and standardizing data. At the same time, customized reports have been beneficial for gaining insights about specific business scenarios.

“Crafting a resilient data analytics platform is like building a custom home,” said Gogula Aryalingam, Associate Vice President of Data and AI for Fortude. “You begin with an architectural plan to structure the space, prepare your data foundation, and construct the storage framework. Subsequently you enhance the platform with KPIs, business metrics, and machine learning models, culminating in a valuable resource that provides insights into your business performance, its drivers, and improvement strategies.”

Having established a solid foundation for its data and AI architecture, Spot will continue to advance in its data journey. The architecture put in place promotes self-service business intelligence and data science initiatives within departments – these will feed value to business metrics standardization, resulting in business acceleration.

About Fortude

Fortude is a global enterprise solutions company, that delivers digital solutions that matter to its customers around the world. The company’s enterprise digital services capability spans across ERP, integrations, application development, data analytics, managed services, automation, and digital advisory.

Fortude has offices in the US, Canada, UK, Sri Lanka, India, Singapore and Australia and partners with several large global technology, cloud, and automation product companies.

About Spot

As one of the fastest-growing logistics companies in North America, Spot is built on relationships, combining 24/7 support with proven, passionate, and dedicated team of logistics professionals. Spot provides custom, tailored logistics solutions for shipping challenges through relentless effort, industry knowledge, and advanced technologies. Established in 2009 with the vision that there is a better way to move freight, Spot has more than 600 employees across its U.S. locations in Indianapolis, Indiana Charlotte, North Carolina, Tempe, Arizona, Tampa, Florida, and Chicago, Illinois. For more information, visit Spot’s website at spotinc.com