Global 500 Fleet External DW Data Integration to SFDC Using OData

Organization

Our client is an international car rental and fleet-management service company that serves millions of customers annually with
5,000,000 vehicles throughout the past five years in more than 15,900 global locations. In an attempt to simplify the operational
and financial risk, the company licenses its brand out to roughly 60 international franchises. Additionally, the client also serves “Insurance Replacements”—for insurance companies such as All State and State Farm insurance to a wide range of corporate customers.

For the past decade, our client’s goal was to be the No-1 market player. They embarked on a digital transformation journey in 2016 to streamline processes to connect to customers and partners and win back customers to reclaim the No-1 position again in the International Market.

Challenge

As part of their digital transformation initiative, the Salesforce CRM solution was implemented to support Hertz Corporate & Retail Customer. As part of the CRM solution, Salesforce.com (Sales Force Dot Com (SFDC)) needed Data Warehouse transaction data. This included customer rental & reservation data for reporting and decision support related to corporate accounts. XTIVIA worked with the client to implement a turn-key OData solution.

The technical challenges encountered were the following:

• Huge data volume
• 5 years of historical data needed for rental for reporting
• 5 years of advance data needed for reservation for reporting
• Transaction data changing every day needed batch load to SFDC
• Huge SFDC storage needed to support such volumetric transaction data
• High cost to support SFDC storage which can grow rapidly due to transaction data
• Supporting business performance expectation for reporting through SFDC was not easy

TECHNICAL SOLUTION

The client wanted the room to innovate and rapidly deploy an alternate data solution that provides the best service in the industry. This solution would connect with external data sources to SFDC to create a standard reporting solution on SFDC to support quick business decisions. With OData implementation from XTIVIA, our client can make its vision on external data connectivity and reporting on SFDC a reality. XTIVIA used OData & MuleSoft to support external data connectivity to SFDC and to deliver the visualization needed. The implementation phase included a top-down approach and roadmap that consisted of the following task:

• Understanding reporting requirement for CRM on transaction data
• Understanding of transaction data for reservation and rental
• Data consolidation and curation for monthly reporting and processing within data warehouse
• Creation and configuring OData API in system layer
• Creation of experience layer API for request and validation
• Creation of process layer API for response

Some of the advantage that the OData solution provided:

1. Since OData is an open protocol based on REST Services, we can get data based on URL.
2. It supports various protocols like http, atom, pub and it also supports JSON format.
3. You’re able to write your own custom methods.
4. Lightweight so the interaction between client and server will be fast compared to web service and other
   technologies.

High-Level Data Flow

Detail Context Diagram

BUSINESS SOLUTION

XTIVIA found a new way to make external data & information available on SFDC to support decision making. Our team implemented a scalable and extendible OData solution that aligns to our client’s data virtualization vision and meets future demands:

• Quick data delivery without heavy ETL/Data Engineering process
• One source of truth to make the decision process smooth & quick
• No extra cost/extra storage for SFDC platform
• Master & transaction reporting available on SFDC without bringing huge historical data to SFDC
• OData tool that works with most of the external data sources
• Makes data collaborative and available on a single platform
• Live data changes/curation
• Support typical SQL for easy implementation

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