Palantir Technologies and WesTrac, a Caterpillar dealer and provider of heavy mobile equipment and aftermarket services to the Australian mining and construction sectors, have announced a multi-year enterprise expansion of their partnership, which began in 2021, to deploy Foundry across core operations.
The expanded partnership will initially focus on deploying Foundry across WesTrac’s component rebuild centres and to inventory management teams to drive greater overall efficiency and customer delivery for WesTrac.
Palantir's Foundry operating system is being used to help increase the throughput of WesTrac's Component Rebuild Centre at its headquarters in Perth, Western Australia. It is being expanded to the Company's Tomago facility in NSW. Foundry is used daily by workshop planners and supervisors to improve task scheduling decisions, manage upcoming part constraints, and increase labour efficiency through proactive alerting on task performance and schedule adherence.
WesTrac's Inventory Management teams will also leverage Foundry to identify deficits in available inventory that may block workshop progress, enabling the team to make more proactive ordering decisions.
“In the current technology-rich era, WesTrac has a strong focus on incorporating enhanced data-driven decisions across our business as we look to drive our own digital transformation and improve delivery of Cat products in Australia,” says Jarvas Croome, chief executive officer at WesTrac.
“Implementing Foundry has delivered a strong initial return on investment, and we anticipate the five-year expansion of our partnership with Palantir will enhance ROI and enable more data driven decisions. The Foundry platform has been a leading feature within WesTrac, with rapid uptake, high usability, and widespread acceptance by users across the business. As we expand the scope of Foundry, including to new applications like AI solutions, we expect uptake of Palantir’s products to increase. WesTrac is committed to providing world-class products and services to our customers by ensuring operations are supported by the latest technology, which is why we are pleased to be extending our partnership with Palantir.”
“This expansion represents a significant commitment to our partnership with WesTrac. Foundry now serves as the Digital Twin for WesTrac’s core operations, delivering tangible business benefits,” says Ashwin Rajan, head of commercial for Australia at Palantir.
“The suite of software in Foundry help front-line component rebuild centre and inventory teams improve overall efficiency and customer delivery. For example, in just the last six months, Foundry has identified a significant number of constrained parts blocking work order progress, and suggested remediation strategies to ensure continued operations. WesTrac predicts these outcomes alongside improvements in inventory management will drive overall throughput up by at least 5% over the next five years, with additional benefits expected in other areas such as reduced working capital requirements and improved time to invoice.”
In addition to Foundry, WesTrac plans to explore AI solutions leveraging a software suite, including Palantir's new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). AIP can allow WesTrac to better connect sales to operations by enabling sales functions to ask questions of workshop operations, inform sales strategy and improve the accuracy of information provided to customers.