How TQL Went From 3000 to 500 BI Reports with Pantomath
Total Quality Logistics (TQL) is the second-largest freight brokerage firm in North America, overseeing the movement of over three millions loads of freight annually. Learn how Pantomath helped them revolutionize their data operations.
Total Quality Logistics (TQL) is the second-largest freight brokerage firm in North America, overseeing the movement of over three millions loads of freight annually. TQL provides world-class people-led customer service, backed by industry leading technology, analytics and data science.
The Challenge
Over its 27-year history, data and analytics has become increasingly important to the business – and resulted in many reports and dashboards. TQL had built more than 3,000 business intelligence (BI) reports, fed by a web of data pipelines and dependencies.
In this environment, it was difficult for TQL’s data team to understand what was being used and whether there were duplicated efforts and understand roots causes when reports didn’t look right.
At TQL, the sales team is one of the biggest consumers of BI reports. The team closely tracked reports on sales generation, load volume, plan tracking, and more. When reports looked incorrect, the sales floor would be the first to see and escalate the issue. This happened enough that the business was losing confidence in the data.
One of their biggest reports that the sales team depends on includes a massive amount of data and complex logic. The report refreshed every hour and was constantly experiencing issues.
On top of the challenges in understanding the data and detecting issues in the current environment, TQL was making the move from on-premises to the Cloud. As part of the move, the data team needed to understand what data was actually being used and make informed decisions on what to prioritize.
“We needed a way to get in front of data issues before the business was impacted, and we needed to start simplifying our processes in the new data platform,” said TQL’s Senior Director of Advanced Analytics and Automation .
The Solution
TQL implemented Pantomath to better understand their end-to-end data pipelines from data producers to data consumers and to monitor the health of both the data pipelines and the data flowing through the pipelines powering reports.
With Pantomath’s end-to-end data observability and traceability platform, TQL gained visibility into their data pipelines, the reliability of their data, and the health of their reports. When something goes wrong, Pantomath pinpoints the issue and makes resolution faster and easier.
“Now, if something breaks, we get an alert from Pantomath. I have the peace of mind that I won’t get a phone call in the middle of the night, and there is no need to sit on calls to manually troubleshoot and figure out what happened. We know what has broken, right away,” said TQL’s Senior Director of Advanced Analytics and Automation.
Pantomath has given TQL’s data team more insight into their data and its dependencies. In one case, the company was entering a new region and was planning to make a change to how they handled zip codes to accommodate their efforts. On the surface, the change looked benign, but by looking into Pantomath, TQL’s Senior Director of Advanced Analytics and Automation and her team were able to see that the change would have broken numerous systems downstream. With the visibility Pantomath provides, they were able to avoid confusion and potentially data downtime.
Pantomath has also helped understand the usage and accuracy of reports for migration to the new data stack in the Cloud. With Pantomath, they can understand exactly what data is being used – and the team has been able to reduce the number of BI reports from more than 3,000 to under 500.
“Before Pantomath, we didn’t always know where things were or what sources were being used unless we spent a lot of time asking questions. Pantomath makes discovery much more efficient,” said a TQL Business Intelligence Analyst. “I also enjoy troubleshooting with Pantomath. You can clearly identify issues – whether an ETL didn’t run, a job needs to be rerun, or there was a pipeline failure – with full lineage into the process.”
Learn More
With Pantomath’s end-to-end data observability and traceability platform, TQL has the visibility they need to detect issues before they occur, better understand their data, and aid migration to a new platform.
If you are concerned about visibility and reliability and would like to learn more, schedule a demo with Pantomath’s expert team.
