Highlights
- Delivered a data analytics platform on Microsoft Azure.
- Saved days of manual work doing data extraction, modelling and reporting.
- Enabled sales teams to track sales, budgets and shortfalls to identify areas of improvement.
- Empowered manufacturing and inventory teams to make accurate data-driven decisions reducing significant waste and potentially saving millions of dollars a year.
- Supported Procurement to accurately track spending and identify areas of potential savings.
The Problem
The FMCG organisation was in the early stages of their data and analytics journey, embarking on an initiative to strengthen their IT and Data capability with the overarching goal of becoming a data-centric organisation. They sought a solution to automate report generation, leveraging big data from numerous systems across their operations.
Mantel Group was engaged to provide greater insight, efficiency and precision to manage the organisation’s operations, by establishing automated reporting built off an enterprise data warehouse.
The Opportunity
In order to remain a viable and visible trusted independent service, it was important for the business to continuously enhance its offering in response to key market influences, such as a rapidly evolving energy market, the introduction of smart meters, rise of solar and virtual power plants and frequent new entrants into the market.
The client identified a need to improve the experience for Australian energy consumers by instilling greater confidence and providing more choice.
Following a competitive tender process, the client engaged Mantel Group to design and build a reinvented public interface and retailer interface, to manage the service and provide ongoing support.
The Solution
In collaboration with the organisation, Mantel Group delivered a data analytics platform on Microsoft Azure. Over 20 reports in PowerBI were co-created for teams in Sales, Finance, Manufacturing, Inventory and Procurement.
Some of the details of the data analytics platform are below:
- The data modelling was built using 59 source tables, 140 SQL models and 223 automated tests.
- Pronto was the main data source for the project, supported by flat files for budgets and forecasts, with several flat files successfully migrated into Pronto or the organisation’s Sharepoint environment to ensure better data governance.
- Azure Data Factory (ADF) was used to ingest data from the source system (Pronto), and made it available on an Azure Storage Account, using a custom PowerShell script using the AZCopy utility.
- We used the Azure SQL as the Data Warehouse and using the vCore purchasing model allowed us to easily scale up and down as required.
- Using dbt’s out-of-the-box automated testing and version-controlled documentation meant that Mantel Group had more time to build models providing crucial business value for the organisation, while not compromising data quality and integrity.
- Reports made for the five use cases were developed in PowerBI Desktop and published into PowerBI online workspaces for business-user consumption.
Our Approach
Mantel Group had a multidisciplinary team, with expertise in data platform engineering, analytics, user design and agile delivery, working closely with the organisation to reach their goal of developing an enterprise data analytics and BI-reporting platform.
Our approach involved the following:
- Solution being designed and delivered in small increments that delivered maximum value to the organisation’s end user.
- Delivered frequent drops of end-to-end capability through a series of Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in 2-week sprints. This allowed user feedback and technical feasibility to be managed successfully and allowed Mantel Group to focus on maximising customer value and reducing complexity through incremental delivery of outcomes.
- Adopted an agile approach to allow for regular validation of customer value, high visibility of project progress, comfort around technical elements, and the ability to rapidly iterate improvements throughout the project.
- Using Design thinking, user experience and experimentation, which are fundamental to Mantel Groups ways of working
- Mantel Group built with the future in mind so that the solution enabled long-term flexibility and adaptation.
