Data Engineering with Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Setup on PostgreSQL

From Fragmented Data to Insightful Decisions: A Fortune 500 Company’s Business Intelligence Transformation with PostgreSQL and Stormatics

A USA-based Fortune 500 company, renowned for leading the tech care sector, has been helping over 250 million customers get the most out of their appliances for more than two decades. Operating in nearly 1,000 physical locations, the device and appliance care enterprise began experiencing significant challenges with its data reporting process, hindering its ability to meet growth targets. To overcome this obstacle, the company partnered with Stormatics to engineer its data pipelines and architect a complete Business Intelligence solution.

The Challenge

The IT department struggled to deliver real-time, actionable reports due to data being scattered across different systems. Reports were outdated by the time all data was consolidated, making data-driven decision-making difficult. The entire process was manual, unreliable, and time-consuming.
The company handled a daily influx of 500GB of data, primarily unstructured, from various sources, making it unsuitable for automated reporting.

Old data architecture 

The existing process faced multiple challenges and inefficiencies such as:

1. Inconsistent data formats were being fed into the system from different sources.
2. Use of unstructured BLOBs in the operational data store for database writing.
3. Data being transferred to a logging system for reporting, creating a double-write process that was extremely inefficient and slow, negatively impacting the end-user experience.
4. IT turning off logging during peak hours, making reporting data unreliable.
5. Reports being generated and emailed only once daily.
6. Stakeholders receiving limited insights from half-baked spreadsheet-based outputs with no access to on-demand or real-time data

The Ideal Solution

The goal was to revamp the entire data architecture with a cost-effective, open-source solution to achieve:

1. A single source of truth for business decision-makers
2. Near real-time data access
3. 24/7 availability of on-demand reports
4. The ability for stakeholders to explore, slice, and drill down into data

The Stormatics Solutions

To address these challenges and meet the ideal solution targets, Stormatics restructured the company’s data architecture with a focus on efficiency, scalability, and usability.

Proposed data architecture 

The following modules were implemented:    

1. Data Warehouse

To free up resources directly impacting end-user experience, the dedicated logging process was eliminated and replaced with a customized ETL process designed to cherry-pick useful data from the Operational Data Store and load it into a Data Warehouse (created using PostgreSQL database). This structure transformed unstructured data into a semi-structured, relational format more suited to reporting.

2. Data Marts

Given the sheer volume of the incoming data, real-time reporting required smaller, manageable datasets for the company. Data Marts, targeted to specific stakeholders, were developed. Each Data Mart was fed by multiple custom-built ETL processes. These marts resulted in data that was highly structured and optimized for real-time, relational reporting.

3. Self-Serve Reports

With data now structured and accessible, customizable drill-down reports tailored to stakeholders’ needs were created. Using Actuate’s Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) and JavaScript, these reports were implemented. These reports could be accessed securely via the company’s internal security systems, allowing stakeholders to retrieve them at any time, from any location.

Conclusion

By deploying an advanced BI architecture, the Fortune 500 company now benefits from:

- A single, reliable data source
- On-demand, self-serve reports
- Enhanced data exploration with drill-down capabilities
- Real-time reporting, improving decision-making speed
- Visualization tools like charts and trend lines for better data insights

This transformation has significantly improved the company’s ability to leverage data in a fast-paced business environment, aligning IT outputs with business growth targets.

Why Stormatics?

Planning on enhancing your database performance? Our team of vendor-agnostic experts is ready to help. We provide bespoke performance-tuning services that are in line with your business requirements. Our packaged service includes:

- Detailed analysis of the system
- Optimization recommendations based on usage patterns
- Time-limited engagement with quick-win implementation

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