Highlights
- Faster decision making and release cycles due to Agile approach
- Implementation of tandardised devops practices
- Controlled data governance built on Azure platform
- On the job upskilling of client teams, ensuring long term ownership and success
The Problem
A leading travel and tourism business faced challenges in addressing regulatory requirements, enhancing the customer experience and gaining control over their data.
They had a goal to transform their data services but struggled with diverse data sources, varying regulation, and privacy concerns, lacking a reliable single source of truth.
Key challenges included ensuring data protection compliance, improving decision-making with reliable data and streamlining slow internal processes caused by data quality issues and duplication.
Employees referred to their BI environment as a “data swamp” due to the difficulties in finding relevant information efficiently.
The Opportunity
The organisation needed to rebuild their existing Business Intelligence platform so that they could establish a single source of truth and put data at the heart of its business. This would create a clear line of insight from data to decision, enabling the business to conform to regulatory compliance requirements, speed up the time to decision, and develop the confidence they needed that their decisions were based on validated data, instead of hope.
The Solution
The client, in collaboration with Mantel Group’s data specialist team (a Microsoft Azure Gold partner), implemented a comprehensive solution using the Azure platform, to rebuild their BI architecture in a matter of weeks. The solution focused on the following key areas:
Data Onboarding
- Established a scalable data lake across multiple geographic regions
- Standardised the onboarding process
- Leveraged Azure managed services like Databricks, Azure SQL and Power BI for global scalability
Data Governance
- Implemented data build tools to facilitate data documentation sharing and track data lineage
- Ensured transparency and traceability of data services throughout the data pipeline
Data Reliability
- Utilised DBT for orchestrating transformations, enabling tests to be conducted at any stage of the pipeline to ensure data accuracy
- Easily identified and addressed malformed data by quarantining and remediating it
Empowered BI Team Members
- Encourage a proactive approach to business intelligence, adopting new tools and technologies
- Implemented a standardised DevOps approach, shifting from a reactive to a proactive data pipeline maintenance strategy
Fast Release Times
- Integrated Azure components to accelerate the release cycle to production
- Ensured consistent and predictable behaviour across different environments through Infrastructure as Code
Our Approach
Mantel Group adopted an Agile approach, ensuring incremental delivery of project outcomes every few weeks while proactively identifying and addressing risks through early mitigation strategies. Regular showcases involving decision makers played a crucial role in providing clarity on the intricate business logic underlying the development, fostering a shared understanding among all stakeholders.
Embracing a collaborative “one team” approach, we were able to to prioritise upskilling key client team members throughout the project, rather than relying on a single comprehensive training session at the end. This approach allowed the client’s BI team to gain proficiency in utilising Azure platform tools and implementing DevOps practices, empowering them to take ownership of the solution in the long term and minimising the total cost of ownership.
