Scaling a data department with strategic data advisory and implementation
Netlight partnered with a leading global logistics provider to scale its data department and build end-to-end Data Products – growing the team from 10 to 25+, standing up ML infrastructure, and delivering dynamic pricing and market analysis tools – enabling a 5-20% revenue increase across trade lanes and empowering managers to act proactively on sales targets.
About the client
With over 79,000 employees at over 1,300 sites in over 100 countries, the client is one of the world's leading logistics providers operating in sea, air and road logistics.
Challenge
The client aimed to become more data-driven, cohesive across regions, and efficient internally. To achieve this mid-term vision, the data department had to revise its strategy and scale its product portfolio. This implied growing the team, setting up cohesive ML infrastructure for all projects, improving databases and data pipelines to assist diverse business processes such as sales, freight forwarding, pricing, marketing, tender management and market analysis.
Solution
Netlight supported with data advisory across engineering and growth management to smoothly scale the data team from 10 members to over 25 before the end of the first year. We also provided implementation support to develop end-to-end Data Products for sales and market signal forcasting, master data de-duplication, dynamic pricing, tender management and freight forwarding. For example, a tool that calculates prices for customers considering past negotiations, customer details, shipment characteristics and market indices to enable pricing managers to make better-informed decisions. We continued the department's growth by handing over and enabling internals once the client's hiring process caught up with its growth.
Impact
- Scaling the data team from under 10 to 25+ members across Front-end, Data Engineering, MLOps and Data Science along with infrastructure to enable the development of business critical dataproducts.
- Enabling regional sales managers and account managers to prioritize their work and to act proactively by engaging with customers where sales targets were at risk.
- Estimated increase in revenue of 5-20% when using the prices suggested by our tool across different trade lanes.
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