Case Study: Marquette Transportation Company achieves real-time vessel visibility and mobile analytics with Microsoft Power BI

Marquette streamlines its waterway transportation services with Power BI

Marquette Transportation Company, a Paducah, Kentucky–based provider of inland waterway transportation that operates over 133 tow and tug boats, needed reliable, 24/7 access to vessel status and location data for customers, vendors, and on-call staff. Before adopting Microsoft Power BI, employees often had to boot a laptop, log into the ERP and spend about 10 minutes to find critical information—an approach that didn’t work for crew or staff who were on vessels or away from a workstation.

Using Microsoft Power BI, Marquette’s analytics team built real-time vessel status and location reports accessible via the Power BI app and Power BI Q&A, enabling staff to get answers on their phones in seconds and consolidating multiple data sources for faster decisions. The solution freed employees from workstations, improved customer service, and shortened lookup time from roughly 10 minutes to seconds; Marquette has also expanded into key influencer and text/sentiment analytics in Power BI to track crew morale and safety, showing significant improvements over the prior rating system.

Marquette Transportation Company

Whitney Cruse

Vice President of Barge Logistics