This People First Spotlight features Amar Srivastava, a Data Engineer at Ruan, who shares about his experiences within the data realm and its impacts within the transportation and logistics industry. Data engineering is a critical component in running our business accurately and securely while providing key metrics for our customers.
Learn more about Amar and how he strongly supports Ruan and our partners:
Q: Tell us a little about your career path and background.
I graduated from Iowa State University with a dual degree in Chemical Engineering and Mathematics. My career at Ruan began in Logistics Operations, where I gained direct insight into network logistics. I then transitioned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA), deploying applications to automate many of the manual processes common in the transportation and logistics industry. From there, I moved into a role on Ruan’s Solution Engineering team, optimizing large-scale networks. Together, these roles provided me with deep exposure to Ruan’s diverse data systems, including finance, dispatch, brokerage, and many more, laying the foundation for my current work as a data engineer.
Q: Tell us about your role at Ruan and how you support our customers.
As a data engineer, my role is to integrate systems into a secure and compliant enterprise data lake. I support our customers through two functions:
- Maximizing Analytical Yield: I sculpt our "data landscape" to empower our analysts and engineers to work with the broadest possible set of data related to their goals. By organizing data through high-level modeling, I enable our teams to better optimize costs, on-time delivery, and other specific customer objectives.
- Ensuring Data Integrity: I maintain data quality and cleanliness through automated checks and active maintenance. This ensures that the insights and designs we present to our customers are built on a foundation of accurate data.
Q: What do you enjoy most about working with data in the transportation and logistics industry?
I am a problem-solver at heart and enjoy the variety of complex challenges unique to this industry. For example, a project might involve taking chaotic and noisy streams of data, such as sensor or video safety data, and stabilizing them into a structured format. This is an exciting prospect for me because this stability may instantly reveal both clarity and insight, both of which can be delivered to our customer base.
Q: What has been your greatest professional accomplishment during your time at Ruan?
I don’t know if it’s my greatest achievement by impact, but the most memorable achievement for me was early on in my career. During my time in RPA, I stood up automation applications that collectively saved roughly 920 hours per week in tedious, repetitive, and manual process time.
This was specifically memorable because I got to see these savings go directly to our customer base; our associates were now free to pursue high-value work like dealing with network disruptions or optimizing the way we build customer orders into physical shipments.
Q: What does Continuous Improvement for our customers mean to you in your role?
In data engineering, continuous improvement can be defined as incrementally increasing both the scope and quality of our datasets. Everything we do has to pass through this frame of reference; even marginal improvements can have a major and cascading effect. Better data results in better analytical yields, which in turn means smarter, more informed decisions, lower costs, and higher service levels for each of our customers.
Q: What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
Because I genuinely enjoy writing code to solve complex problems, most of my free time is spent writing open-source software.
Currently, I maintain a small library that allows operations researchers to simulate traffic on U.S. highway networks within Python environments. I’ve extended this work to allow for artificial intelligence to interact directly with these networks, identifying optimal routes under highly complex and ambiguous scenarios.
Q: What advice would you offer to those considering a career in the transportation and logistics industry?
Be hungry for knowledge and commit to learning. One of the best things you can do is seek out mentors who have decades of experience in your field and ask for an hour of their time to pick their brain. If you do your research beforehand and ask the right questions, you can learn in an hour what might otherwise take you years of experience to learn yourself.
The next best way to learn is to deliberately think about ways to add value to your company or your customer base. Excel at your given role, but don’t be afraid to take on side projects along the way. Even if most of them fail to materialize, trial and error will give you the insight needed to take on the high-value prospects.