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Case Study

Global Talent Company Roadmaps The Merging of Data Through a Modernized Technology Stack

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The Customer’s Challenge

A global leader in talent solutions approached phData to assist in developing a roadmap for combining enterprise and subsidiary company data in a way that would allow simple and accurate data analytics – or a single source of truth – for the entire business. 

They requested a comprehensive technical assessment of their current state to identify variances in data and analytics that would inform the process of developing the future-state roadmap.

The client’s ultimate goal was to reduce complexity and variability in their environment and assemble a company-wide technology stack that was more responsive, efficient, and manageable going forward. 

phData’s Solution

phData’s comprehensive technical assessment provided the detail needed to recommend the build-out of a migration plan from the client’s legacy MS SQL Server platform to the Snowflake Data Cloud. This migration would ultimately provide a single source of truth for enterprise and subsidiary company analytics. 

In the end, phData also made the following recommendations: 

  • SQL Server & Oracle to Snowflake
  • SSIS to Qlik Replicate & Matillion
  • Tableau Server & WebFocus to Tableau Cloud (online)
  • SSRS to Power BI

The Full Story

The client is the parent company of multiple subsidiary companies where each has its own data platform and maintains its own data and metrics. Having already completed a partial migration of the parent company on their own, the client decided to focus on their largest subsidiary company for this work with phData. 

The goal of the project was to create the gold standard in migrations that could be replicated for the remaining subsidiary companies in the future.

Because the client still had many varying siloed data platforms, there were often data discrepancies at the enterprise level when reports were pulled. Additionally, the client carried a high amount of technical debt from maintaining more data platforms than necessary. 

By completing a comprehensive technical assessment, phData was able to provide a detailed view of the subsidiary companies’ data needs, broken down as follows:

  • SSRS: phData identified the total number of reports and then analyzed the tables/views, queries, and SQL calls used by these reports
  • Analytics: phData identified the number of impacted reports across Tableau and WebFocus dashboards, analyzed the data source types, the types of connections, the number of custom queries, and frequency of MS SQL Server tables/views used by Tableau Server data sources. 
  • Metrics: phData identified key metrics and classified them by priority (primary/secondary) and Type (attribute, grain, metric) as it relates to both SQL Server (operating company) and Snowflake (enterprise). For those metrics already in Snowflake, phData identified the variance in data results. For those only in SQL Server, the elements needed to build the metric were identified.
  • SQL Server Objects: phData identified and analyzed the number of tables/views in SQL Server, and the number of stored procedures, agents jobs, and SSIS packages. These were then categorized by complexity and gaps were identified. 

Why phData?

The client chose phData because of our experience and expertise with Snowflake and in helping larger companies modernize their technology stack.

Results

phData’s future-state roadmap helped the client find their path forward in migrating from multiple clunky legacy systems to one modernized technology stack. This plan would allow for a reduction in technical debt and provide simple access to accurate data analytics for the entire business…oh, and with zero downtime!

Modernized Technology Stack

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