Client story Ritchie Bros. Scales Global Marketplace Insights With Looker

Connecting global buyers through digital transformation

Ritchie Bros. sits at the heart of the heavy equipment world. They act as a giant bridge between people who need to sell massive machines and those who need to buy them. Chris Rowinski, director of product management – data products and AI, sees Ritchie Bros. as more than just a sales forum. He views it as a high-tech marketplace that moves everything from farm tractors to heavy industrial machinery and transport trucks. To keep this bridge strong, Ritchie Bros. has a vision for data maturity. They want to turn every piece of information into a clear step forward for their customers. This mission connects them to a larger trend: the shift toward smart, real-time commerce in the industrial sector. By mastering their data, Ritchie Bros. ensures that the world’s biggest machines find new homes quickly and efficiently.

The challenge: Optimizing data sharing

For years, Ritchie Bros. had data increasingly living in many more places. The company operates more than 60 sales yards around the world. At these sites, team members work fast to prepare equipment for sale.

To gain a full view of yard operations, staff previously pulled data from multiple systems into manual reports. This approach created operational complexity, reducing the time available for core customer-facing activities.

Reliance on manual reporting in spreadsheets and distributed data systems made maintaining a consistent, real-time view of critical business information a high priority. Rowinski recognized an opportunity to improve data consistency by establishing a centralized source of truth.

Removing friction from one-off data solutions

“Today, our yard staff often gather information from multiple systems and bring it together to meet their needs,” says Rowinski. “We’re working to streamline that process by providing a more consistent and efficient way to access the data.”

One key opportunity involved streamlining the paperwork for assets scheduled to go up for bid. In the marketplace business, timing is critical, and having all required documentation completed and assembled on time helps support an efficient sales process. Because some information was maintained in local folders and team spreadsheets, yard managers didn’t always have immediate access to it. “The data was primarily accessible to the team at that particular yard,” says Rowinski.

To support the company’s continued growth, Ritchie Bros. wanted to improve information sharing between their yards and head office. The goal was to create a more connected approach that would give teams consistent access to accurate, up-to-date information.

The solution: Building a unified reporting foundation

Ritchie Bros. saw an opportunity to modernize their data environment and worked with Insight to transition from the existing on-premises systems. Together, the teams built a new cloud-based data stack using Google Cloud, with BigQuery and Snowflake providing a scalable, organized foundation for millions of records.

To help teams access and interpret the data, Ritchie Bros. and Insight selected Looker as the company’s primary analytics platform. Looker’s modeling framework, LookML, allows Ritchie Bros. to establish consistent definitions for core operational metrics and marketplace insights..

“LookML provides a governed framework that helps us define and manage our metrics consistently,” says Rowinski. “It gives Ritchie Bros. a shared foundation for reporting across the organization.”

As a result, teams such as finance and sales can work from consistent metrics when reviewing reports and making decisions.

Setting up the development and production architecture

Insight assisted Ritchie Bros. in setting up the development and production architecture for Looker by helping them create a dual instance. This means the team has one sandbox for building new tools and a separate production area for finished reports. This protects the business. If a developer does something unintended while testing a new feature, it won’t break the dashboards that the yard managers use every day.

“Insight helped Ritchie Bros. introduce an ability we've never had in the world of BI and analytics,” says Rowinski. “For the first time, we have version controls, which is especially important for the core enterprise dashboards that our senior leaders use. This is a huge win, because if something unintended occurs, we can roll things back and assess the code to figure out what happened.”

The solution also focused on pushing data rather than pulling it. Instead of asking a busy yard manager to log into a complicated website, the system now sends them what they need. Looker monitors the data and spots equipment that’s nearing its sales window. When it spots such an event, it triggers an automated email. This approach took the technical weight off the employees' shoulders and put it on the software. “We abstract away all the complexities,” says Rowinski. “We just feed the people the data they need to take action on.”

As another part of the Looker solution, Insight also built new dashboards that track marketplace trends and auction performance, helping teams optimize asset positioning for upcoming sales events.

The outcome: Winning with real-time marketplace insights

The move to Looker and Google Cloud gave Ritchie Bros. a massive boost in speed and clarity. Today, the company operates with a level of transparency that they have always wanted. Teams no longer spend their mornings hunting for data. Instead, they use that time to take advantage of opportunities and serve sellers.

Quantifiable benefits

• Reduced the hours spent on manual data entry and spreadsheet compilation
• Shortened the rollout of new business reports from months to weeks
• Decreased training time for new employees on data tools
• Boosted the accuracy of asset tracking, protecting auction revenue

Qualitative improvements

• Better decision-making: Yard managers are alerted to needed titles or contracts instantly, letting them fix issues before sales start.
• Stronger data culture: The company now holds regular demo days. Employees feel excited to show off new ways they use data to help the business grow.
• Improved trust: Since everyone has the same single source of truth, interdepartmental trust has grown. Finance, marketing, and operations all work from the same playbook.
• Easier access: By using Single Sign-On (SSO), the company streamlined secure access across their global teams.

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