About Smarte Carte

Smarte Carte maintains millions of pieces of rental equipment across the world. Any time equipment is not functioning, the company risks lost revenue and dissatisfied customers. The team needed a way to automatically report equipment problems, in a way that efficiently integrated data across a vast IoT network, so as to minimize downtime.

The Challenge

Smarte Carte’s current architecture faced key challenges ensuring uptime for equipment dispersed across diverse venues, One particular challenge included , automating and monitoring data flows to NetSuite Analytics Warehouse (NSAW) that were prone to data ingestion errors that interrupt reporting. This led to increased monitoring and engineering costs.

The Solution

Smarte Carte employs Nexla to integrate the data from the IoT equipment across the field, to automatically notify managers of unresponsive equipment so that it could be addressed immediately. Nexla enables Smarte Carte to establish and sustain reliable data flows from various sources to NSAW, ensuring a streamlined, single-source actionable data approach. This results in a substantial reduction in engineering and monitoring costs.

The Impact

Before Nexla, our data analyst was spending up to 50-60% percent of her time doing maintenance of those data flows. Whereas in today’s world, she may spend just 5% of her time on that.” — Chris Farrier, Director of Finance, Smarte Carte

• Freed up 50% of data analysts’ capacity 
• Reduced maintenance time by 90%
• Prevented multiple millions in revenue loss
• 100% reliability on data flows
• 100% Leveraged all data integrations in one place

Prevent Revenue Loss through Minimal Equipment Downtime

As Smarte Carte maintains millions of pieces of equipment across the world, Achieving effective communication through reliable data flows from the equipment to the managing team was crucial for early issue detection such as battery outages. Not working equipment could result in revenue loss and decreased customer satisfaction.

Nexla enables Smarte Carte to monitor the status of its equipment closely. Any disruption in communication — a scheduled ping not coming through, for instance — is immediately flagged, prompting an automatic notification to the manager to verify the issue. With Nexla’s universal connector, IoT data extraction and transformation are seamless, automatically prompting email notifications. This has significantly boosted Smarte Carte’s equipment uptime, averting a 1% revenue loss across multiple service areas.

With Nexla, we’ve been able to maintain that reporting structure to the field to ensure that the equipment stays operational. Should we lose that capacity, we would definitely see an impact in our revenue stream by a full percentage point.” — Chris Farrier, Director of Finance, Smarte Carte

Reliable Enterprise-Level Data Management

Smarte Carte recently transitioned to storing all its data in NSAW after the introduction of NetSuite and NSAW. The company shifted from using various storage services like Amazon storage services and Google storage services to consolidating all data in a single source of reportability in NSAW. With Nexla’s integration support, this transition has proven to be efficient in handling the large volume of records accumulated daily.

All of our Nexla flows have been 100% reliable so far. They just work.” — Chris Farrier, Director of Finance, Smarte Carte

According to Chris, “We’re moving millions of records daily related to that (the transition). And from everything I’ve been told, that volume has been handled very well with Nexla.” Nexla’s reliability eliminates the common issues experienced during system upgrades, such as broken links. This consistency has been crucial in every aspect of the ongoing delivery of mission-critical data, all without requiring constant oversight or intervention. As Chris puts it, “It’s kind of like your phone service– you just expect it to work, to be running and reliable.”

Free up 50% Capacity for Delivering Valuable Insights

The importance of building and maintaining reporting structures is paramount to Smarte Carte: reliable data pipelines to NSAW ensure the delivery of actionable insights that sustain the company’s operations. Nexla’s configuration-based solutions help data analysts at Smarte Carte to customize every detail of the pipelines in order to cater to the requirements of various business users, all with minimal coding effort required.

Nexla takes away the burden of maintaining and monitoring data flows. Before, a data analyst at Smarte Carte would spend about 50 to 60% of their time maintaining data flows, but this has now reduced to less than 5% — an incredible time savings of up to half. This situation has allowed for more time to be allocated towards generating valuable insights from the data versus maintaining the infrastructure itself. In Chris’ words, “Having that reliability and sustainability, truly partnering with us, making themselves available, getting errors fixed and corrected – those are the primary components that separated Nexla from other ETL tools.”

Summary

The requirements and needs of Smarte Carte’s users are complex, involving extracting, transforming, and loading large volumes of IoT data from sources numerous sources. Nexla has proven to be a transformative solution for Smarte Carte, addressing challenges in equipment uptime and automating data flows to NSAW. The partnership has yielded significant results, including a remarkable 50% increase in data analyst capacity, prevention of a 1% revenue loss, and 100% reliable data flows. Nexla’s proven reliability and consistency in providing accurate, actionable data make it a crucial component of Smarte Carte’s data strategy.

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