99x powers Norway’s market leader in vehicle inspections through cutting-edge big data architecture

The successful deployment of the predictive service has enabled BUS AS to utilise decades of data to bring about real-time benefits and savings to its consumers today.

As a high-end innovative technology partner to numerous global software providers, 99x continuously works towards expanding its product engineering services to incorporate emerging tech trends. From fusing IoT with Blockchain to integrating machine learning into projects to bring about greater and more intelligent automation, 99x’s research teams work closely with the newest technology to understand unique ways of integrating them into real-time business solutions. Understanding and harnessing Big Data effectively has been a core focus area for 99x’s research team and it recently worked with Norway’s market leader in vehicle inspections to implement a Big Data-driven predictive service.

BUS AS, a long-standing customer of 99x, manages a software platform that tracks vehicle service records in the Nordic region. BUS wanted to explore a solution that utilised three decades of data to come up with predictions of a potential areas of defects in a vehicle once its registration number and the mileage are known. These predictions would then help workshop technicians cut down inspection time, while also helping second-hand vehicle buyers to know in advance the potential defects of vehicles they are buying. Such a prediction service, once put into practice alongside human intuition, would bring in significant cost savings.

To put things into perspective, 75% of all periodic vehicle inspections in Norway are reported via BUS and it processes 1 million vehicle inspections per year. Three decades of such information translated to a staggering 3.7 billion defect records.

“We see it as our mission to provide powerful applications to advance the accuracy and quality of vehicle inspections and vehicle trade-ins. Big Data can have a big impact for the future of car workshops and dealerships. The 99x Big Data team’s expertise has been essential in propelling BUS into the forefront with this unique solution,” stated BUS AS Product Development Lead Lauren Hoivik.

Creating this predictive service for BUS required 99x to identify the proper tools and environment to evaluate such a vast amount of data, carry out ‘data cleansing’ on millions of records to fix inconsistencies, embark on detailed testing and quality assurance of the datasets and the model, look into performance optimisation, manage cloud cost, work around various privacy considerations and more.

“Products and platforms that must deal with Big Data is fast becoming the norm but extracting actionable insights from information requires new approaches, techniques and tools. In addition to the final insights produced (in this case, the defect predictions), a big data project generates a dataset which is semantically well-orchestrated out of dispersed, incomplete and potentially inconsistent pieces of data. In this project, 99x’s big data team was able to create significant new IP for BUS by harnessing an array of disciplines such as privacy-preserved processing, statistical analysis, machine learning, cloud computing and big data QA,” noted 99x Senior Director – Research Dileepa Jayathilake.

While it proved to be a challenging project for 99x, it was one with many learning outcomes for both the Norwegian and Sri Lankan teams. Importantly, the successful deployment of the predictive service has enabled BUS AS to utilise decades of data to bring about real-time benefits and savings to its consumers today. This was one of the many projects in which Sri Lankan engineering ingenuity has been harnessed by 99x to drive innovation, globally.

99x is a technology company co-creating well-engineered, innovative digital products for the Scandinavian market. Its expertise has been proven through a portfolio of over 150 impactful global digital products, developed together with leading Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). 99x employs over 350 technology and product specialists, who are high achievers, creative thinkers and team players. The company is one of Asia’s Best Workplaces for 2021 and has been named a Best Workplace in Sri Lanka for nine consecutive years.