Customer Profile

Our customer is one of largest logistics solution providers in the US. They cater to both short-distance and long-distance movement and storage needs for residential and commercial customers.

Background

Initially the logistics customer grew organically, and they relied on a home-grown ERP solution. They did not have a good enterprise BI infrastructure, instead the managers relied on Excel reports specifically designed for their needs. The reports were generated from disparate transactional data sources, and it was difficult for the management to get a comprehensive view of the business.

In the recent past, the logistics customer merged with another similar entity, and it made their data journey even more difficult. It was almost impossible to get reliable combined KPI (Key Performance Indicators) metrices from the existing infrastructure. The new management also wanted to bring in new data sources to enhance the ability to derive better business insight.

Our client wanted to create an enterprise BI infrastructure that will scale as the business grows and provide reliable data infrastructure to cater to a wide variety of reporting needs for different stakeholders – from the C-Suite to the managers.

Why Bridgera?

Bridgera had been the preferred software vendor for this customer for over a decade. Our team had a deep understanding of the legacy systems and the associated data sources.

We have been delivering actionable business insights to our IoT (Internet of Things) customers as part of our IoT service offerings. IoT use cases deal with disparate data systems – both structured and semi-structured. Our team is well equipped with a wide variety of Data Engineering and BI skills e.g. – Data Wrangling, Data Cleaning, Modeling, ETL (Extract, Transformation, Load), and BI reporting. Bridgera team also has expertise with advanced Embedded Analytics tools and processes for delivering business insights to our customers via web embedded BI dashboards. Bridgera has the skills and experience to develop industry leading enterprise BI solutions.

There are a lot of different options for BI tools out there. This customer wanted us to create the data infrastructure on Azure cloud environment. Bridgera team does not focus on a particular toolset, instead our team has expertise with most of the popular tools along with not-so popular but quite effective BI tools. It was not that difficult for us to create a team to quickly deliver this project. We were able to pull together a team comprised of a Data Architect, Data Analyst, ETL Developer, and a BI developer for creating the new BI infrastructure for this customer.

Results

• We created a dimensional model for storing the enterprise data and deployed it in Azure SQL data warehouse. The data warehouse stored data from legacy systems, data sources from the new entity, and other new data sources.
• Created a lot of data cleaning routines for sanitizing the source data and delivering clean data for business reporting.
• Used Azure Data Factory (ADF) for creating ETL jobs and loading the data into data warehouse.
• Created OLAP models to support specific business reports. Thanks to the flexibility and extensibility of the models, it becomes easy to deliver new reports quickly.
• Removed the legacy excel reports and started delivering BI reports via Power BI.
• The new infrastructure created on Azure cloud addressed scalability issues. It is now possible to easily pull out combined KPI metrices from the new infrastructure.
• Azure SSO (Single Sign-On) was used to implement security across the data infrastructure.