Data Discovery at Bulkmatic

As the largest dry bulk carrier in North America, Bulkmatic provides a network of dry bulk transportation services designed to meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. With world-class operations in the United States and Mexico, their expert team of truck drivers, mechanics, tank washers and managers work together closely to drive their business forward with each and every shipment.

But like most companies, much of their data is collected and buried in systems across the organization.  Their ability to relate the data was generally difficult, and therefore minimized. Bulkmatic determined that in order to make their business better, and provide the required data insights to optimize performance, they needed a way to centralize and report on the data effectively.

Bulkmatic engaged with DB Integrator (DBI) to provide a solutions framework encompassing all of the functionality to collect, manage and use their data.  The solution runs in the AWS cloud environment with significant scrutiny on cost, simplicity, and reusability.

After obtaining system access to many of the Bulkmatic source systems, including one in Mexico, the table data was replicated into AWS Redshift without any coding.  This was accomplished by applying rules to orchestrate the data integration from various source databases, including Excel spreadsheets.  Very quickly, they were seeing data from across the organization collectively.  They leveraged their internal analysts to build SQL scripts, and scheduled these using other DBI utilities.  Ryan Strauss, the CIO at Bulkmatic, stated that this “empowered the analytics team, and they are no longer constrained by the traditional IT barriers with respect to data access”.  Ultimately, Bulkmatic was able to provide significantly more business insight from across the organization, and leveraged their existing tools like Microsoft PowerBI.

As of this publication, Bulkmatic is still running on a single node AWS Redshift instance which costs .25/hour, and their monthly AWS costs have not exceeded $400.

Contact Ryan Strauss, CIO at Bulkmatic for more information regarding their partnership with DBI.

Visit DBI at dbintegrator.com for more information on their enterprise solutions.

AWS S3 and AWS Redshift are applications provided by Amazon Web Services.