Business Intelligence System Upgrade

Auto Europe is an international car rental brokerage. Through partnerships with a handful of car rental dealerships, the business operates by providing customers value through customer service, additional rental packaging, and competitive pricing. The industry is filled with competitors who mostly compete on the pricing through internet platforms like Kayak and Orbit. Auto Europe operates out of several offices to manage different regions of the world and the headquarters is in Portland Maine.

As the company has grown over the decades, the technology and the infrastructure did not keep pace with the business need. Data had been maintained in several legacy systems which were not compatible with the current reporting environment. With a new CEO, the information pipeline had new purposes which required new tools.

My role in developing the new business intelligence environment was challenging especially since I was new to the company and the industry. I was tasked with merging the communication of information between siloed departments, databases, schemas, and spreadsheets across multiple offices.

Over the course of a year and a half, I worked alongside employees from a variety of departments and offices to understand how the data was handled for specific roles. My team included an employee from the Munich Germany office who had been working on reporting for 18 years. Together, we deconstructed several Microsoft Excel queries, Microsoft Access queries, and translated them into queries suitable for Power BI as our first phase.

Our second phase required vetting of several data integration tools. We eventually felt that Mulesoft was the best choice for our data and spent several weeks working alongside their development team. The collaboration led to standing up a MariaDB database which we used as a consolidated data source for reporting. This was a major improvement for Auto Europe’s business intelligence since all reports were consuming consistent data that could be monitored and investigated as necessary.

Once the data was centralized, my team was able to shift focus to maximizing the value of company reports. We focused on reducing the manual calculations, highlighting the metrics that were important to specific audiences, and organizing the accessibility of information. This was all done to the delight of the executive team, who were able to quickly assess the health of the business. Management teams were able to track the progress of pricing projects and make proactive decisions based on forecasted measures.