Chemical Manufacturer Uncovers Immediate ROI in Move to Data Cloud

SUMMARY

The client faced many of the data challenges that are common to a large number of manufacturing companies. The client’s initial challenge was data processes and analytics that existed across siloed systems and required manual effort to collect, which caused a high risk of inconsistency and tribal knowledge. Pandata Group worked in unison with the client’s IT team to deploy a cloud data platform by identifying a high-value use case that would act as the client’s data analytics foundation.

THE CUSTOMER

The client is headquartered in Brookfield, WI, and is one of the United States’ largest and most respected chemical manufacturers and provider of related services.

THE CHALLENGE

Working with Pandata Group, the client identified a use case to improve the access to and analysis of Transportation Management data. The focus of the project was to support business transformation goals of being more agile and applying more innovation to business decisions. An existing barrier to innovation was that the current state included data siloed in a legacy, AS400 mainframe ERP, and a line of business application in the cloud.

Additionally, data processes and analytics were heavily dependent on manual intervention. This manual effort also included many of the calculations and transformations of data being stored on several users' computers, in spreadsheets and static reports, which led to the inability to tell a complete data story. This process was not scalable and impeded the growth of data use and capability for analysis and insight for decision making.

THE SOLUTION

Pandata Group designed and implemented a Transportation Management Analytics solution to address the current and future business challenges in a modern data cloud platform. This Azure-based platform consisted of the Snowflake data cloud with a data warehouse workload, and Matillion for data ingestion and transformation. The foundation use case included a series of workshops that united IT and the business, iterative

The client’s business team modernized their reporting by converting legacy reports to Power BI and connecting to the Snowflake-based data model.

BUSINESS VALUE

Upon implementation of the data cloud, the client began to see improved utilization outcomes. Within 8 weeks the client discovered enough savings to re-coup nearly 75% of the project investment. Additionally, the client was able to measure improvements in four key areas: operational efficiency, business insight from data discovery, streamlined access to integrated data, and data quality. As a result of its cloud data migration, the client is now able to focus on increasing revenue and operational agility, while reducing costs and risk.