KION Group, Europe’s largest manufacturer of forklift and warehouse trucks, has deployed the Dremio data lakehouse solution to extract actionable intelligence from vast, siloed data sets, and to accelerate decision making.

KION Group employees can now interrogate more than 200 million data records to receive responses to queries in just three seconds, compared to the 30 minutes the task would have taken prior to Dremio going live. Dremio’s self-service analytics means that non-technical users, such as product owners or service leads, can run complex data queries without the assistance of IT professionals. With real-time data, problems and their causes are identified in a timely manner.

KION Group has more than 1.7 million forklift trucks and warehouse trucks in use at customers across over 100 countries on six continents. Following a period of business reorganization and mergers, KION Group was left with an IT system characterized by isolated solutions across a large number of different systems.

Powered by Dremio and run on Microsoft Azure, the KION Analytics Platform (KAP) integrates live queries into everyday work as a matter of course. Product families, models, or even locations can be switched and the information becomes tangible. For employees, the analytics make it immediately visible where fine-tuning or course correction have become necessary.

Dremio’s commitment to open source eliminates vendor lock-in, which was another persuasive factor in KION Group rolling out the technology. KION Group is now assessing a range of other commercial scenarios to see where Dremio analytics can add further value — with use cases under consideration such as an error history at parts level, where the entire life cycle of a truck’s components can be viewed.