Case Study

Window Manufacturer Discovers the Right Data Strategy & Tools

The Customer’s Challenge

A manufacturer of high-end windows and doors wasn’t keeping up with its digital-first selling by investing in data and real-time analytics. They turned to phData to guide them toward the right solutions and data strategy.

phData’s Solution

phData’s eight-week data strategy and platform sourcing project gave them the framework to build out their migration plan into Snowflake, including ingestion and transformation pipelines.

The Full Story

The customer is new to data and analytics, but they knew that they had to improve their data to increase time to value. 

With their previous stack, data analytics ran all night to give the team the insights they needed without interfering with bandwidth. 

Now, the customer wants to get closer to real-time analytics. They’re focused on equipping the sales organization with current inventory and giving the manufacturing team insight into what the sales team is selling. 

Taken together, this means the customer can double down on producing the most popular and profitable products. Their new data approach will also enable their customers to have more accurate delivery timelines.

Why phData?

To achieve the above goals, they wanted a knowledgeable partner to help them make the transition to agile methodologies as they invest in digital transformation. 

The customer’s head of Data and Analytics had worked with phData in the past at two other companies; when they joined the window manufacturer, they knew they could count on phData’s expertise. 

Finding the Perfect Data Strategy and Tools

The customer first hired phData to work with them to identify an overarching data strategy.  

Based on this data strategy, the phData team determined that the next step would be to identify the best ingestion and transformation tools into Snowflake.  

They hired phData to run a Proof of Value (POV) comparison of several ingestion tools (including Qlik Replicate and Fivetran) and transformation tools (including Qlik Compose, dbt, SnowSQL). 

These suggestions were based on:

In just eight weeks, phData helped them identify the benefits of Snowflake and onboard them to the platform quickly. 

Our work also paved the way for additional data analysis use cases as the customer migrates to Snowflake.

Results

phData provided exactly what the customer needed to jumpstart their digital transformation: a thorough analysis of the available tools and the data strategy to migrate seamlessly. 

First, we connected each of the tools to pre-selected source datasets and ran several days of ingestion. We analyzed the capabilities of the tools and captured metrics on the impact of running the ingestion processes. To make the project a collaborative one, we held regular touchpoints with the customer’s stakeholders to provide a full side-by-side comparison of the tools.

This eight-week project has given them the framework to build out their migration plan into Snowflake, including ingestion and transformation pipelines.

Take the next step
with phData.

Learn how phData can help solve your most challenging data analytics and machine learning problems.

Data Coach is our premium analytics training program with one-on-one coaching from renowned experts.

Accelerate and automate your data projects with the phData Toolkit