Modernizing a data warehouse and advanced analytics solution for more than 200,000 retail locations.
In 2018, Advantage Solutions (Advantage) was looking for a technology partner with the capabilities to reimagine and architect a new data warehouse that could accommodate data for more than 2,000 manufacturers' products at 200,000 retail locations and instructions for thousands of retail service team members.
As Advantage began to scale and grow, the organization faced technology hurdles that limited their ability to extract data and manage data integrity.
Like many organizations facing modernization challenges, Advantage was faced with an aging technology stack, hindering any potential to support and scale for its more than 50,000 employees.
InfoMagnus was chosen as Advantage's technology partner to architect an entirely new cloud-driven data warehouse and advanced analytic solution that would support and deliver a dependable future for years to come.
The business challenge: To enable more efficient and reliable delivery of retail services and data to clients and internal services teams.
Over the course of several years, Advantage had leveraged multiple technologies for each of its business units, while company acquisitions added technology stacks that impeded the move toward modernization. This created a complex technical environment and complicated the access and extraction of data both internally and to service teams in the field.
Data integrity suffered from limitations imposed by structure, history, and multiple technologies, while accurate reporting and data analysis became increasingly difficult.
The data Advantage collects contains critical information that produces instructions so that Advantage service teams can perform their duties and provide consumer insights.
In Pursuit of Big Data Success: Exploring the Multi-Year Data Warehouse Modernization and Advanced Analytics Project.
Advantage partnered with InfoMagnus to embark on a multi-year data warehouse modernization and advanced analytics project.
The first phase was to build a data warehouse strategy to combine the Retail Services data warehouse and Advantage Retail Technology Services (ARTS) data warehouse into a single solution which serves as the reporting data source for internal teams and Advantage field representatives.
In stride, InfoMagnus technologist began the design and implementation of the data warehouse strategy, which included:
Selection of the appropriate technology,
Architecture of new data warehouse and its implementation,
Application of common data structures & technology,
Configuration & sizing of the development, test and production environments,
Design, documentation, testing, & implementation of the necessary ETL process,
Design, documentation, and implementation of reports and dashboards.
The Success of the Unified Data Warehouse.
The unified data warehouse has been successfully designed and implemented within the agreed time and budget. Technical complexity has been reduced and organizational efficiencies have been achieved.
The system design and technology stack were reviewed by experts from Amazon, Talend and third-party consultants and was recognized as having a “Robust Design” aligned with industry best practices.