A leading broad-line distribution company, through its subsidiaries, markets and distributes more than 160,000 food and food-related products from 83 distribution centers to over 170,000 customer locations across the United States. More than 18,000 its employees serve a diverse mix of customers, from independent and chain restaurants to schools, business and industry locations, hospitals, vending distributors, office coffee service distributors, retailers, convenience stores, and theaters.
WHO WE WORKED WITH
A leading Broadline distribution company
INDUSTRY
Consumer Staples
HEADQUARTER
Richmond, VA.
AREAS OF OPERATIONS
North America
The Challenge
Integrate multiple legacy systems and reduce time to integrate new M&A to EDW
The company consists of three major segments and each segment has its own separate IT applications. The company acquired two distributors with more than forty distribution centers this year which increased the distribution centers located to more than a hundred twenty locations and more than seven heterogeneous data sources for each business function. Their existing enterprise data warehouse brought data from four source systems, but it was not enough for enterprise reporting and analytics. It took more than a year to onboard one M&A data due to political, operational, and technical challenges. There were separate teams to manually collect the data from M&A not in Datawarehouse and consolidate the report manually to submit to Corporate management.
Merger & acquisition of new companies led to additional heterogeneous data sources, exponential growth in data volume, & increased demand for centralized reporting. Existing data warehouse data technology hit the threshold to support the existing systems.
Business analysts from Sales and marketing demanded a temporary space to bring data from multiple sources for analysis. Many of these analyses include the analysis needed to design product offerings or creating a new revenue stream. The company needed a technology that could easily integrate with a system on cloud or on-prem.
Netezza is the enterprise data warehouse data storage technology and running on the threshold. It is currently processing 100 GB of data every day. The data volume will increase by 100% if the company brings data from all its M&A companies. Additionally, IBM already announced the end-of-life for Netezza. The company wanted to find a replacement for Netezza by the end of 2020.
OUR SOLUTION
A modern data warehouse – Snowflake
Apptad developed a solution roadmap and suggested implementing a cloud-based modern technology. It recommended Snowflake for data technology. Apptad helped the customer in defining the problem statement, quantifying the business value to measure the Implementation success, refining the solution roadmap to incorporate snowflake, implementing the Snowflake, and establishing the data governance team.
Apptad designed data onboarding frameworks to onboard the data from newly procured companies and utilized Snowflake pipes to ingest data into Snowflake. A separate Snowflake partition was given to each business segment including Sales, procurement, finance for the ad-hoc analytics and intradepartmental reporting. Each user gets a temporary space to load and profile data from various sources to generates business insight. Apptad is training users and supporting the implementation.
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