Enterprise Data Collaboration and Reporting

This post talks about how technology can help companies to standardize, unify data across multiple systems and provide the ability to take data driven decisions.

One of the many challenges of rapidly growing business is in the area of data management. Most small and medium companies have very niche business skillsets. However some companies tend to overlook data side of business. Situation can quickly grow into an intricate mess.

Such was a situation with one of US’s major e commerce team, speaclizing in niche set of products. Data was in disparate systems, stored in silos and a whole bunch of “excel data” issues.

The Challenge

“Build a system which gets data from various systems and provides a single source of truth to anyone and everyone within the organization”

Integrate data across various source systems, build an enterprise wide data ware house system, preferably on a cloud platform, with least manual intervention for maintenance. Help organization on standardizing data governance and introduce a systematic way of inducing projects. Future ideas include building analytics models to support e commerce, inventory and sales teams.

The solution

“Simple, secure & reliable solution”

At Smartello analytics, we always stress on keeping solutions simple and usable. Key is to understand business needs thoroughly, breakdown complex systems into simple modules, apply solutions to fit needs.

We decided to build a solution around Azure cloud offering, which client favored.

As evident from above diagram, solution was to

• Build a centralized DWH system using Azure single database option to keep costs down.

• Majority of ETL would be done in Azure data factory.

• Replace numerous SFTPs with centralized Azure storage locations.

• Take in one module at a time, in line with agile build methodologies.

• Automate systems, example, use APIs instead of manually checking shipping information, avoid calling on warehouses for inventory check.

• Rebuild customer models to at least identify new and repeat buyers, save some headache for e comm team.

• Build a master products base, helping teams across business to access single source of truth.

• Create analytic and machine learning models, to help cater to various needs across organization.

Benefit

The solution provided by us helped our client to initiate their journey on cloud on a strong note with the help of a centralized system and make all their future initiatives much more smoother.