Retail Brand Transformed into Data Driven Organization
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Initial challenges faced by the brand
Before the transformation started, the company had multiple challenges that are common across industries.
Solution built to alleviate challenges and transform the business
WWT assembled a team of business consultants, data architects, data engineers and visualization developers who partnered with the retail brand's internal teams to build a next-generation data platform that unlocked significant and tangible business value. The solution was built around two major technologies.
Through the design and development of the platform, the collective team was able to transform what had been challenges faced by the brand into areas of strength, improving the business in the process.
Leveraged WWT's management consulting capabilities and worked with the client's business groups to identify, scope and design analytics dashboard use cases – changing the paradigm from reports that require significant data digging to find answers into dashboards that alert changes in the business that can be acted on. The team led workshops with business stakeholders and users to define current workflows, pain points and optimal business outcomes, culminating in next-generation analytics dashboards.
Designed the dashboards based on real life user workflows and employed the full suite of Power BI functionality to make the solution dynamic and sustainable as the business grows over time.
- Drill Through Capability – ability to summarize insights and enable users to click high-level data points and drill into more detailed analyses, continuing to ask and answer new questions
- Dynamic Data Filtering – capability to select any piece of data within a dashboard and it subsequently filters the rest of the page to only show related data for analysis
- User Specific Customization – functionality to personalize dashboards based on data filters provided and save analyses relevant to a user's role / area of focus to return to
- Push Notifications – facility to setup dynamic push alerts via email based on relevant changes in the data that need to be acted on
- And much more!
Paired creative data modeling along with Snowflake's targeted and scalable processing power to unlock insights previously unavailable to the client organization. The solution leverages the full power of Snowflake's cloud computing engine only where/when it is needed for specific analyses on large and complex datasets. Snowflake allows the client to isolate specific virtual warehouses to individual workloads and to scale compute up and out as use cases require. For example, product purchase analytics at the detailed SKU level was not possible in the legacy SQL warehouse without adding additional hardware. By directing these new specific workloads to larger Snowflake warehouses, product level insights previously unavailable are now consumed in executive level dashboards, and the cost is manageable because they are only paying for what is used, not having to build out an environment based on peak capacity. The result is on-demand scalability and agility, enabling the development and delivery of timely business value and actionable insights.
Utilized Snowflake's flexible warehouse design to keep dashboard demands separated and expose data in seconds that previously took several minutes to load. For example, the solution provides insights on historical customer segmentation movements (across billions of rows of data) by leveraging Power BI Direct Query integration with a dedicated Snowflake computing warehouse. When the executive users want to investigate customer data movements by city, the query is sent back to Snowflake on a dedicated warehouse that is isolated from other dashboards or ad hoc analysis workloads and an answer is returned to the business user in seconds that can be acted on to improve marketing campaigns and drive incremental sales.
Leveraged the Snowflake and Power BI administration functionality to simplify managing and extending the solution. From Snowflake, utilizing the user-friendly GUI, role-based access control, built in time travel, zero copy cloning and more! From Power BI, applying email subscriptions management using AD groups, row level security, workspace access control and more! As a result of the simplified administration, the team is able to focus more on adding business value through extending the robust capabilities.