LeasePlan Streamlines Its Fleet Operations with Cloud-Native Telematics Solution

LeasePlan is a global leader in the car-as-a-service business, managing almost 1.9 million vehicles in 29 countries. Its in-house platform collected telemetry data for each vehicle, but it needed more support for real-time data tracking and reporting. LeasePlan turned to AWS Premier Partner Quantiphi to boost operational efficiency through better analytics capabilities. Quantiphi created a scalable solution that provided LeasePlan with real-time telematics visibility and driver-related data to enable better business outcomes using Amazon Web Services (AWS) services.

LeasePlan's in-house platform ingested telematics data such as vehicle usage, maintenance, and repair information from connected vehicles. But the platform did not process the data in real time. It also needed reporting capabilities to help analyze vehicle health, driver patterns, and other data. Without this real-time analysis, LeasePlan could not reduce operations issues or improve how it used assets. This was affecting business adversely. Parsh Wanath, vice president and principal architect at LeasePlan USA, explains, "Telematics is a key differentiator in the automobile leasing industry, and we wanted to develop a unique platform that could help us with real-time data processing." LeasePlan USA collaborated with Quantiphi, an AI-first digital engineering firm and AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, to create this platform. Quantiphi specializes in solving business problems through industry experience, cloud and data-engineering practices, and artificial intelligence research.

Quantiphi designed a scalable and cost-effective solution to suit LeasePlan's needs, leveraging its expertise in AWS analytics services. This solution currently monitors vehicle and driver data 24x7 and sends real-time alerts to fleet managers. In addition to tactical actions, the information enables strategic decisions like asset purchases and sales.

The solution uses several AWS services, AWS Lambda ingests telematics data from IoT devices installed in the vehicle fleet and buffers it into Amazon Data Firehose in real-time. Enriched with the 'OpenStreetMap' public dataset via AWS Lambda, this data is processed through Amazon Kinesis Data Analytics to obtain data points for over-acceleration, hard braking, oil pressure, and battery life.

The event and daily summarized data are then persisted from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) via AWS Glue job into Amazon Redshift, a modern data warehouse. Subsequently, Amazon QuickSight, the AWS business intelligence and analytics service, integrates data into this stack to present key insights and visualizations like daily traffic violations. Finally, Rest APIs designed on Amazon Redshift provide data extraction for the end client and internal business tools.

The new telematics solution lowered LeasePlan's monthly infrastructure budget, enabled better tactical and strategic decision-making, and adopted enhanced features like real-time analytics through DevOps best practices.

The solution delivered significant cost reductions for LeasePlan through operational benefits such as fuel savings, incident minimization, and improved customer experience. Further, vehicle downtime and occurrences of vehicle failure have declined substantially. Overall, the automation of critical operations has improved operational efficiency.

LeasePlan considers this a springboard for accelerating the company's growth with more deployments. They intend to modernize more legacy applications using AWS services. According to Parsh Wanath, "AWS services like Amazon Kinesis Firehose played a significant role in enabling the solution. The overall solution helped us establish a foundational capability to identify more use cases to transform and digitize other parts of our business. This helped us to improve our customers' efficiencies and business operations."

It's looking like "full speed ahead" for LeasePlan.