Global Manufacturer Gets Faster Insights With Snowflake Data Platform

This industry-leading manufacturer relies on data from multiple SAP systems for insights that help them optimize the cost and logistics of moving raw and finished materials throughout their plants, warehouse systems, and worldwide shipping destinations.

The company was using Amazon Redshift to capture data from its transactional SAP environment along with external data from shipping vendors. As their data volumes grew, they continuously scaled their Redshift solution but experienced continuous performance issues. Business users were frustrated by the slow data load process and the system’s inability to provide real-time reporting.

The solution was highly dependent on IT to provide business users with access to the specific data they need. It also suffered from performance challenges when managing multiple concurrent workloads such as data visualization, machine learning models, and other analytical needs.

The company needed a high-performance enterprise data platform that would make this data available to its internal teams and support data sharing across multiple divisions of the parent company.

Partner ecosystem drives fast value from Snowflake

The company worked with Wavicle Data Solutions to build an enterprise data platform and data warehouse environment using Snowflake on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure as the basis for reporting and analytics solutions.

They were attracted to Snowflake as part of an overall vision for a governed enterprise data platform. Snowflake offers critical benefits, including the ability to provide instant value and scale seamlessly using a pay-per-use model that enables the manufacturer’s data platform and data integration team to deliver valuable data and analytics to both internal and external customers.

The solution leverages the AWS cloud data architecture and infrastructure they previously developed with the Wavicle team for their procurement organization. Talend, Fivetran HVR, and AWS Glue are critical data integration tools that translate source data from SAP and non-SAP environments and consolidate it into Snowflake.

As an experienced Snowflake partner, Wavicle helped the manufacturer extract the most value from their Snowflake investment. Drawing on combined Snowflake, AWS, and the manufacturing industry expertise, Wavicle helped the customer deploy a Snowflake solution on AWS infrastructure much more easily, making sure all software and services work well together to deliver fast value from their enterprise data platform.

Snowflake solution focuses on automation, data sharing, and scalability

Wavicle designed a solution that features a variety of technologies and capabilities that improve performance, data access, data sharing, and cost of maintenance. It includes:

• Full automation of the design, implementation, and management of data warehouses and data marts
• Snowflake-native features such as Tasks, Snowpipe, and Streams to transform raw data to analytics-ready data marts
• Wavicle’s ingestion framework to add new data sources easily by automating repeatable tasks
• Snowflake multi-cluster shared data architecture for enhanced scalability
• Snowflake virtual warehouses dedicated to users and applications to provide resources based on SLAs and business needs; this supports data loading and processing as well as analytical operations without competing for resources and enables the company to attribute compute costs to associated departments and business lines
• Snowflake-native capability to process semi-structured data (JSON/XML) to reduce external executions of processes and eliminate the need to move data into and out of Snowflake
• The ability to share data with other business entities securely without building data pipelines, making data available instantly

Igniting the business, this solution enabled end-to-end product lifecycle transformation and provided world-class supply chain orchestration. The end result allowed the integration of standards to non-differentiated business processes to reduce waste, drive on-time delivery, ensure quality, and support game-changing leadership.

Executives get the information and insights they need

This solution allows the company to integrate data from multiple internal SAP systems, external shipping vendors, third-party logistics companies, and more. End users now have the data they need for reporting and analytics.

Snowflake has enabled a cost-efficient, highly secure architecture with fully managed infrastructure to support a variety of data warehouse use cases, including batch and near real-time ELT pipelines, and offered tight integration with AWS resources as well as applications like Tableau, Power BI, and more. This transformation made it possible to deliver wins for the business by serving them when, where, and how they prefer. New insights and KPIs were also generated to enrich customer journeys, measure experiences, and drive continuous improvement.

Wavicle’s Snowflake and AWS experts built a more effective enterprise data framework for this global manufacturer that fuels the company’s data and reporting needs, allowing the business to accelerate decision-making with rapid access to high-quality data, analytics, and insights.