Customer Success Story
Servicing Data and Analytics Teams to Achieve Operational Excellence
We helped our customer save over $2M through the right mix of talent, process improvements, and automation over past the two years
InfoCepts partnered with a global market research company to streamline its data and analytics operations. We set high-quality standards with zero defects and delivered first-time-right solutions.
The Challenge
Our customer owns a flagship data product, which facilitates market analysis and provides competitive information to 20+ retailers and manufacturers across the globe. The product is customized to meet the needs of its clients, and is domain- and market-agnostic. It is powered by MicroStrategy, a business intelligence tool, with 65+ dashboards comprised of 10K+ elements need to be customized each time a new client is onboarded.
Time spent on customization was high whenever a new client was onboarded because report elements needed to be manually modified per client requirements. Our client’s process was error prone—there was room for automation. Data and user experience quality were not up to the mark.
Moreover, its existing team lacked expertise and there were inherent process gaps. Combined with the lack of change control processes, missed SLAs led to dissatisfaction on behalf of our customer’s clients. Given project size and scale, much effort was required during release lifecycle operations—such as objects migration, release management, and deployments.
The Solution
Our customer needed a trusted partner having E2E DevOps expertise. InfoCepts was already a valued partner in other data and analytics areas, so operations leadership asked us to address the cited problems. Where its contract with a vital retail customer was at stake, it needed immediate assistance in delivering critical reports/dashboards.
Our team delivered well before the deadline and turned our customer’s situation around. Having gained more of its confidence, our customer had us take over application development and support operations.
InfoCepts embarked on this project with “quality, zero-touch, and trust” as guiding principles shared with our customer. We focused on accelerated delivery and operational excellence through automation and process improvement—especially in relation to release management and reports development. We eliminated redundant efforts and avoidable system complexities by deploying a range of methods, some of which follow.
We used Analytics Platform Automation Kit (APAK)—a proprietary InfoCepts tool—for automating release lifecycle-related operations. It provides a unified web UI to access all MicroStrategy environments, leveraging the repository concept to reuse standard design and code templates. This led to productivity gains, faster time to value, and TCO savings for our customer. Supplementing APAK, we also used a .NET-based metric extraction tool along with Excel macros to achieve accelerated delivery and seamless operations.
Per client-specific requirements, our team reduced manual efforts by 80% through automated tuning and relabeling of dashboards and all objects. Dashboard element comparison and automated release checks let us assess 10K+ elements pre- and post-deployment. This improved deliverable quality by eliminating any possibility of human error. UiPath, robotic process automation (RPA) tool, enabled the team to automate UAT testing of application functionality as well as data.
The Customer
Our customer is a leading research firm operating in more than 100 countries. It helps companies make faster and better business decisions by providing end-to-end (E2E) insights as to what consumers watch, listen to, and buy. InfoCepts has more than a decade-old relationship with the customer.
Industry
Retail
Business Functions
Operations
Solutions
Managed Services
Technologies
Oracle, MicroStrategy, UiPath
Solution Accelerators
Analytics Platform Automation Kit (APAK)
Geography
North America
Year of Deployment
2018
We received this project with a complete new team and a product in very bad shape in relation to confidence and alignment among the teams. With processes and governance, we got them working at full speed, along with a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve—quality, zero touch, and trust.”
The Result
The implementation resulted our customer in the following benefits for the customer in the last 2.5years:
- Annual savings of $1M (cumulative savings of over $2M since 2018)
- 50% reduction in new client onboarding time (from six to three weeks)
- Zero (0) instances of delayed delivery since InfoCepts took over support
- 100% quality results and zero (0) instances of client defects after production releases
- Productivity gains: Team size reduced from 20 to 12 by virtue of automation and efficiencies
- Using APAK, our customer achieved high velocity and high complexity MicroStrategy object releases—realizing 30% savings in overall Centrally managed 1000+ migrations quarter involving 1500 projects, 40+ Intelligence Servers, 100+ MSTR administrators
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