LeasePlan Realizes its Next-Gen Data Strategy with a Logical Data Fabric

• Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service
• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

• Automotive

• Business Operation
• Logistics & Transportation

• Fleet Management
• Predictive Maintenance

• Data Science Services
• System Integration

LeasePlan, a global leader in Car-as-a-Service, was transitioning from an analog business model to a fully digital one. As a car-as-service company, LeasePlan collects a large amount of behavioral data, marketing data, traffic information, social media information, and services and maintenance data. All this data needed to be integrated and contextualized for business decision-making and optimizing business services. However, being a globally distributed company, LeasePlan had data spread across a variety of siloed and heterogeneous data sources (SAP, Salesforce, IBM DB2, Snowflake, etc.), making data integration and data delivery challenging for sound business decision-making, optimizing processes, creating new business models, and complying with EU regulations. LeasePlan aspired to become a fully digital car-as-a-service company by expanding its service portfolio and encouraging revenue-generating activities through innovative products and services. Achieving this required the creation of a unified Global Data Hub, to act as a single source of truth of high-quality data for the whole company, and to support proactive and reactive data initiatives.

LeasePlan is a global leader in Car-as-a-Service, with approximately 1.8 million vehicles under management in 29 countries. LeasePlan purchases, funds and manages new vehicles for its customers, providing a complete end-to-end service for a typical contract duration of three to four years. With almost 60 years’ experience, LeasePlan’s mission is to provide what’s next in sustainable mobility so our customers can focus on what’s next for them. LeasePlan is transforming from an analog business model to one that is fully digital. It aspires to become a fully digital car-as-a-service company by expanding its service portfolio and encouraging revenue-generating activities through innovative products and services.

To realize its objectives, LeasePlan came up with a Next-Gen data strategy with a vision of any data, anywhere, anytime; regardless of the form (structured, semi-structured, and unstructured) to serve the unique needs of the drivers and fleet managers in every country in which it operates. It also intended to include capabilities for metadata management, data quality, and data governance as central components guarding the overall data assets of the corporation to allow trusted access to data across the enterprise. The focus was on creating a platform that can adapt to fast-changing technology in the data space, so the technology agnosticism of the new platform was extremely important. The Denodo Platform checked all of LeasePlan’s requirement boxes. It is a technology-agnostic platform capable of establishing a logical data fabric architecture, one that would enable LeasePlan to connect to a wide variety of new data sources and data-consuming applications. LeasePlan can easily switch technologies, if necessary, without impacting any business operations. The logical data fabric, powered by the Denodo Platform’s data virtualization capabilities, provides an abstraction layer to create a single, secure point of entry to LeasePlan’s entire data ecosystem.

• The logical data fabric provides a foundation for data self-service, simplifies migrations to the cloud, and helps LeasePlan to create transformational new use cases in customer experience and convenience, such as predictive vehicle maintenance programs.
• The Denodo Platform’s data virtualization capabilities provide an abstraction layer to create a single, secure point of entry to LeasePlan’s entire data ecosystem.
• By providing a centralized framework for data governance, the platform also protects LeasePlan’s customers and ensures the highest level of data safety, at the core of the logical data fabric.

• LeasePlan is able to move its on-premises data to the cloud with zero downtime for its BI reports.
• LeasePlan has also effectively offloaded data marts from a legacy data warehouse to the cloud, across various business units in different countries.