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Case Study

Major Midwest Manufacturer Lays the Groundwork for a Customer Data Hub

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The Customer’s Challenge

After nearly 150 years in business, a major household goods manufacturer based in the midwest has a strong history and an even stronger customer base. But, until recently, they didn’t have a way to bring together all their consumer interactions to better understand how their customers interact with the company. Moving to the cloud would be the first step in gaining that critical insight.

phData’s Solution

Our expert team of cloud engineers prepared the customer for a major shift from legacy architecture. We identified the stakeholders and dependencies we’d need to work with to centralize customer information from a wide range of systems. Driving the standards for an Azure-based data platform, we created a customer data hub that both reports on current consumer interaction events and serves as the foundation for future data initiatives.

The Full Story

While the client’s immediate goal was to create a customer data hub, we needed to take three factors into account:

  • The client was very early in their cloud computing journey.
  • We needed to build a data platform to centralize disparate data.
  • The data architecture will need to handle more complicated data analytics projects down the line.
With these in mind, phData approached this project by designing the core services needed to set up a cloud-based data platform in Azure, and then detailing the ways the project could improve internal processes to support better data analytics and customer journeys.

Why phData?

The phData team first met the client’s IT group as they were getting ready to stand up their new cloud environment. 

Once the client realized they would need help specifically with Azure, a partner made the introduction because of phData’s proven history of building scalable cloud-based solutions for a multitude of use cases.

Building the Foundation for a Customer Data Hub

The move to the cloud was to open up the opportunity to create a customer data hub to support  customer-facing teams — but we had to get the client set up with an effective cloud infrastructure, first. Without an effective cloud infrastructure, the customer would have faced the possibility of working with faulty data, impacting revenue and the customer-facing side of the business down the line. 

Establishing a customer data hub isn’t as simple as just moving the data from on-prem to Azure. To make data easily available to the end user in near-real time, the client also needed a seamless automation process for pushing, pulling and validating data in the cloud. 

Given their experience in migrating customers to the cloud, our experts knew they needed to follow this process: 

  • Identified existing data sources and systems. The first step is get a full and accurate picture of the legacy architecture — and where data would be coming from once the data platform was set up.
  • Set up new information architecture and cloud infrastructure with Azure. Using Event Hubs, Data Factory, and Cosmos DB, we set up data streaming into the data lake and batch loads for the main data platform. The new infrastructure feeds into Azure’s data lake storage, leaning on Azure Functions. Finally, the team built automation so that the client can build new environments and create a secondary Disaster Recovery environment as needed.
  • Automated data ingestion for the new platform. Using Azure DevOps, the team set up CI/CD to automate ingestion. We also integrated monitoring with the services for centralized logging and alerting.
  • Implemented the solution with both network security and authentication best practices. Our team ensured data that could be ingested and transmitted securely by leveraging virtual network private endpoints and active directory authentication between data producers, consumers, and pipeline services.

This is what the customer’s information architecture looks like now: 

Working with Better Customer Data

With the foundational information architecture and data platform set up, the client can centralize data from various sources and enable new analytical uses. In a phrase, they’ll be able to extrapolate from customer interactions to support new projects and better customer experiences.

By integrating Reltio, a solution that merges customer attributes into a ‘golden profile’, the client can send more robust data to their customer data hub. This creates a 360 degree view of the customer, joining customer interactions across multiple platforms with a common customer profile.

The customer data hub is set up to allow for:

  • Improved customer experiences, with clear customer journeys.
  • A 360 degree view of the customer.
  • Easier access for customer-facing end users, like a Customer Support specialist.

While the focus of this project was the core services for setting up a cloud-based data platform, our team was sure to leave the platform architecture open for future expansion to meet the growing needs of the business.

Results

While we originally joined the project to focus on the core services for setting up Azure correctly, the expertise of our cloud specialists means that our team has now laid the groundwork for more advanced data analytics and data science projects.

phData’s engagement on this project gave the client an efficient cloud architecture and the foundations for their customer data hub. Now, users will be able to pull the data they need, when they need it — from marketing specialists looking for insight on a new campaign to the C-suite in need of business intelligence insights.

The client is keen to replicate the work from phData in other projects and use cases.

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