Today, we present you stories of our customers who turned to us for a Data Solution Assessment. We are pretty confident some of you could relate to it or have already heard of such situations. Take a look at the following scenarios.

Reign of chaos

THE data jungle

You have recently joined a mid-size (10k employees) company specialized in metal product manufacturing. Once you have completed the initial onboarding, you have immediately delved into the current data architecture to understand how the environment is structured and organized.

This is when you discover that the company has been building its data solutions and environment in an unplanned manner. At the beginning, nobody created a roadmap. Afterwards, this meant that new solutions, layers, and reports were built on top of what already existed without much consideration.

Fast forward 1-2 years and you end up with a big, big mess. Something like this:

Now, imagine you had to untangle this cable jungle… see where we are getting at? That’s what the data architecture looked like.

silos, silos everywhere

Finally, this resulted in the creation of data silos. Here’s a few symptoms of what was taking place:

• Every department has their own reports and report the same KPIs
• The same KPIs returned different numbers! Nobody could agree what was the operational margin last quarter… €22.4M or €21.7M? That’s merely 700 000€ difference…
• Different BUs buy global data on their own. They should pool this spending instead!

On top of that, some systems are on premise while others are spread across different cloud providers. Hence, you took the initiative and decided to resolve this conundrum. A major cleanup and standardization of your data environment had to be the top priority.

The Data Solution Assessment was the first step of the journey.

Can you export that to Excel?

A couple of months ago you have released your new BI platform. The first rollouts went smoothly. Initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive. It felt like a dream come true.

Unfortunately, much enthusiasm disappeared by now. You interview your power users. You realize that people don’t consult those new reports. The main concern was that the KPIs were simply wrong.

For example, one of the salesmen congratulated his team on making a whopping 90% YoY revenue growth (according to the report).

Then, the next day, he opens the report and sees a mere 73% on his KPI. Needless to say how angry he was. You receive ample feedback of that kind. People start calculating the KPIs by themselves in Excel.

On top of that, you learned that many users performed categorizations and mapping on their own. They never shared nor consulted that with their peers.

On the other hand, you have learned that the business units collected lots of data. Data, which was not tapped into. You feel that utilizing that data has a potential to generate significant savings and new business opportunities for your company.

Come to the rescue!

You have recently completed integrating data from 5 new systems. Users were delighted! Now, they could finally connect different pieces together. However, the joy did not take long. The capacity of your data warehouse quickly saturated.

After a few weeks, users stopped retrieving the results of their queries. Everybody got strongly dissatisfied. Then, they started to raise incidents. All at once!

If all of them could get you in person, I’m sure the situation would like that:

As a quick solution, you threw in more capacity. Surprisingly, it did not help. Even more than that: daily processing time has started to take an alarming duration, going sometimes even above the 24 hours mark. At the end of the day, new processing launches before previous batches finishes and nobody can tell anymore what you can really find in the data warehouse.

You see that the issue may be related to something other than the data warehouse itself and would like an external partner to take a holistic look at your infrastructure.

Conclusion

All those situations were the starting point to a new adventure. This is when Astral Forest joined forces with customers who were facing these challenges. Together, as a result of the assessments, we have carved out plans how to remediate in the short run, stabilize in mid-term, and streamline the data architecture for the long run.

Find out how we can help you with your tactical and strategical data challenges.