Summary
Process Insights, a portfolio company of Union Park Capital, was facing a complex challenge. Their essential business data, spanning accounting, inventory, manufacturing, purchasing, and sales, was distributed across systems in the United States, Germany, and China. This fragmentation was hampering their ability to extract crucial insights for data-driven decision-making.
Partnering with ExistBI, Process Insights embarked on a journey to transform their dispersed data landscape into a consolidated, efficient, and insightful data warehouse.
Read how ExistBI approached the challenges faced by Process Insights and designed a tailored solution that will give unprecedented insights into the company’s operations across international locations, including total revenues, sales, profits, revenue forecasts, orders, bookings, accounts payables and receivables, and much more.
About Process Insights
Process Insights, a portfolio company of Union Park Capital, delivers innovative measurement products and analytical instrumentation for industrial, high purity, and lab and research applications. The company’s solutions are used across a wide range of applications and markets to ensure safe operations, increase product and process quality and throughput, and attain increasingly higher levels of efficiency in process industries.
The company maintains three centers of excellence that manufacture and deliver solutions, as well as service and support.
Challenge
Process Insights was facing a significant challenge: their critical data, spanning accounting, inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, and sales, was dispersed across these global systems, impeding their ability to extract essential insights for data-driven decision-making.
The company recognized the need for a more automated, faster analytical, and reporting solution. However, the company lacked the internal expertise to create a data warehouse that could consolidate data from various departments, including accounting, inventory, purchasing, manufacturing, and sales. They required a consultant with extensive experience in data migration, data warehousing, analytics, and reporting to help them better report on their operations and extract the necessary insights.
ExistBI was selected for this crucial task.
Solution
ExistBI embarked on a journey with Process Insights to develop an architecture for an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) which would allow the company to ingest data from their various databases and apply appropriate analytics to extract actionable insights. After consultation with various stakeholders, ExistBI provided an overview of how the existing system would migrate to the new enterprise data warehouse and a detailed roadmap for the project.
The roadmap included a host of tasks, including analysis of source systems, provisioning new data warehouse infrastructure, building connections, verifying data structures, and building reports and visualizations. The chosen tools for this transformation were Microsoft Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Factory, and Microsoft Power BI, each offering unique advantages.
Data warehouse – Microsoft Azure SQL Database
Microsoft Azure SQL Database is a cloud-based, scalable database that allows companies to store and manage relational data. It offers robust security features to protect data, including built-in threat detection, encryption at rest and in transit, firewall rules, and identity and access management controls. It also helps organizations comply with various industry regulations, such as GDPR and HIPAA.
Azure SQL Database takes care of routine management tasks, including backups, patching, and software updates. It provides insights into database performance through metrics, logs, and intelligent monitoring capabilities, helping you optimize your application’s performance.
Most importantly Azure SQL Database offers the ability to leverage services like Azure Functions, Azure Logic Apps, and Azure Data Factory to build powerful data-driven applications and workflows.
ETL and data integration service – Azure Data Factory
ExistBI opted for Azure Data Factory as the ETL (extract-load-transform) and data integration service as it allows organizations to create and schedule data-driven workflows and ingest data from disparate data stores. Companies can build complex ETL processes that transform data visually with data flows or by using compute services such as Azure SQL Database.
Azure Data Factory provides a visual interface for building ETL pipelines, allowing companies to define data transformations using a drag-and-drop interface or code. It supports data transformations like filtering, sorting, aggregating, joining, and more. It also offers built-in monitoring and logging capabilities, allowing organizations to track the execution of their ETL pipelines.
Reporting and analytics
Microsoft Power BI was the tool chosen for data analytics and reporting. Power BI provides a wide range of interactive and customizable visualizations, such as charts, graphs, maps, and tables so users and decision-makers can quickly gain insights and understand complex data patterns quickly.
The intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy for users to connect to various data sources, transform and shape data, and create interactive visualizations and reports with minimal technical knowledge.
Results
ExistBI successfully completed the assessment phase, providing Process Insights with a clear vision of their future data infrastructure. The company now has a blueprint for a global data warehouse that will enable them to gain more insights into their operations across their international locations. The data warehouse will deliver reports on total revenues, sales, profits, revenue forecasts, orders, bookings, accounts payables and receivables, and much more.
With the assessment phase completed and a clear plan in place, Process Insights stands at the threshold of a new era of data management. The upcoming data warehouse promises unprecedented insights, improved efficiency, and enhanced decision-making across the company’s global operations.
ExistBI was selected to implement phase 2, integrating multiple sources into the new data warehouse for a single version of the truth. We are currently working with the management team to identify new opportunities using data science, machine learning and predictive analytics techniques.
Are you ready to transform your data capabilities? Book a free consultation with our experts today and let us help you build the future of your data infrastructure, no matter where in the world your operations are.
