InfoCepts helped a specialty retailer realize annual savings of $288K and achieve 75% productivity gains through data integration, data virtualization, and improved governance
InfoCepts architected and implemented a data integration and access strategy—providing universal, governed access to all of our customer’s critical data sources. This modern approach enables faster data integration at a lower cost, with increased agility when onboarding new data sources.
Our customer’s growing business, recent acquisitions, and evolving data and analytics landscape (including cloud migration) required a change in how its staff leverages data and derives actionable insights. The existing data analytics setup had too many moving parts; the company’s strategy needed an overhaul. Moreover, expectations regarding data and analytics were higher than ever before.
Legacy system and data integration issues – Our customer sought a single data platform reservation system to consolidate its pet grooming, day care, and hoteling functions. The inhouse legacy CRM was limited to grooming operations and couldn’t scale; it also increased costs and deployment time any time a new feature was added. Also, data volume caused bottlenecks in the ETL (extract, transform, load) process, thereby delaying the availability of business reports.
Data quality and lack of trust – Redundancy in existing consumer data caused the retailer to have issues with effective product and services campaigning. It needed to uniquely identify its customers whose data could only be captured across multiple systems. Data cleansing was done manually in spreadsheets—a time-consuming, error-prone, and inconsistent process. Nothing was scalable, performance issues led to delays, and its users could not completely trust the data.
Lack of data governance and automation – Spreadsheet-based reports were manually created after ad hoc requests; collaboration occurred over shared drives. Versioning issues ensued and change tracking was difficult. Anyone having spreadsheet access could view sensitive enterprise information. Clear ownership and accountability didn’t exist, and the entire process was perpetually prone to errors.
High development costs and IT dependencies – Converging data from disparate sources took 16 analysts to create requisite user reports. Data scientists had to spend time getting the right data from the correct sources. An existing enterprise data warehouse (EDW) catered to these needs, but it created increased dependencies on the BI team and increased its workload. Our customer sought an alternative data access layer to complement the EDW.
In short, our customer needed a governed data provisioning solution that could accelerate time to value
InfoCepts’ business analytics team quickly grasped the provisioning requirements presented by the existing challenges. We defined a data strategy and roadmap to integrate data from multiple sources, create a data virtualization layer, and provide for data governance.
Data integration – The new reservation system has many data-driven functionalities, such as appointments, scheduling, customer and pet profiles, products and pricing information (including promotions), and performance-linked pay-outs to staff. It ensures the correct data is always available at the right time.
Data virtualization – Using Denodo, we created an enterprise-wide, data virtualization (DV) layer to provide universal, governed access to all of the enterprise’s critical data sources. Eliminating prior data integration complexity and offering information agility, it meets the unique data analytics requirements of business users and data scientists/analysts alike. And it facilitates collaboration and data understanding.
Data governance – We recommended and executed several data governance aspects across people, process, and technology pillars in this ongoing project. Processes and artifacts created like ownership-consumption matrix; distinct data layers for business and technical users and related processes around security; role-based user access and privileges
The Customer
With 1600+ stores, an online retail presence, and over 56,000 employees, our customer is one of the largest pet retailers in US and Canada. It sells specialty products, small pets, and related services. InfoCepts has enjoyed a decade-long relationship with this retailer.
Industry
Retail
Business Functions
Sales, Retail Operations, HR, Marketing and Planning, Enterprise Analytics, Merchandising
Solutions
Foundational Data Platforms
Technologies
Informatica, Denodo, Snowflake, Salesforce, Azure
Geography
North America
Year of Deployment
2019
The kind of rapport InfoCepts team has built with our stakeholders is exceptional. You’re doing great and continue to win our trust. Commitment, proactiveness, and delivering what is promised are your key differentiators. The recent retrospection meeting had special mention about the good work done by InfoCepts onsite as well as by its offshore teams from multiple key stakeholders.”
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