Palantir Technologies Inc. (NYSE: PLTR) and WesTrac Pty Ltd, one of the world's largest Caterpillar® dealers and leading provider of heavy mobile equipment and aftermarket services to the Australian mining and construction sectors, today announced a multi-year enterprise expansion of their partnership, which first 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 throughput of WesTrac's Component Rebuild Centre at its headquarters in Perth Western Australia, and 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. Foundry will also be leveraged by WesTrac's Inventory Management teams 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," said Jarvas Croome, CEO 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 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," said Ashwin Rajan, Head of Commercial for Australia at Palantir. "The suite of software in Foundry help front-line Component Rebuild Centre & Inventory Teams improve overall efficiency and customer delivery. For example, in just the last 6 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 5 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 suite of software 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, to inform sales strategy and improve the accuracy of information provided to customers.
