Construction Powerhouse Leans on Snowflake to Enable Data-Driven Business Decisions
Customer's Challenge
A construction industry leader specializing in electrical, pre-construction management, design, and installation of voice, data, security, and access control systems, sought to centralize all of their organizational data into one cloud-based solution. Their goal in this endeavor was to build a single source of truth accessible to the entire organization and could be leaned on to drive data-informed business decisions.
phData's Solution
phData helped the client implement a modern data architecture in Snowflake, including a raw data layer, curated data models, and automated provisioning and security policies. This solution would enable faster data ingestion and a single source of truth for reporting.
Results
At the end of the 13-week engagement, the customer successfully centralized all of their data into their new Snowflake environment. The customer has already witnessed improved discoverability and self-service by their stakeholders. Additionally, Snowflake has enabled the customer to access their data faster—in fact, 10x faster!Â
While the engagement with phData is complete, the customer has been armed with best practices to guide them toward continued success with Snowflake. For example, the customer’s development processes were built based on phData’s Toolkit, so things like provisioning new schemas, setting connection parameters, and building data pipelines will be optimized and automated. Additionally, phData advised the customer on how to build out their internal team. Together; the teams discussed the necessary roles, skills, structure, and even job descriptions required to build the internal team the customer would need to reach their future goals.Â
The Full Story
The customer, who was new to utilizing a cloud-based data warehouse, understood that starting out with the best-in-class solution, coupled with third-party expertise to assist with the enablement, would set them up for long-term success. So, they began a 13-week engagement with phData to facilitate their organization’s Snowflake enablement.
The customer’s previous processes for accessing data were somewhat fragmented, with data being extracted from various source systems and loaded directly into Alteryx without a centralized data warehouse. This made maintaining data quality and enabling self-service access difficult, especially for less technical stakeholders. One benefit to the customer’s lack of experience with a cloud-based data warehouse was that they did not have old bad habits to break. The phData team jumped in and guided the customer with best practices for Snowflake from the ground up.
The teams began by utilizing an existing phData toolkit in the client’s Snowflake environment, which allowed them to easily apply security policies and best practices as they onboarded more users and data sources. The phData team also built a variety of custom nodes inside Coalesce to allow the customer to very easily apply policies – for access or masking – to their data as it was moved. These efforts help ensure the integrity of the data warehouse going forward.
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of utilizing Snowflake was the ability to provide self-service. phData implemented the medallion architecture within Snowflake, which included a raw data layer, curated data models, and automated provisioning and security policies to allow for simple reporting. They also introduced the customer to the idea that they could further manipulate the data to meet their needs by building additional data models. phData predicts that the customer will lean into Power BI in the coming year to further these capabilities.
Why phData?
Although very skilled, the customer’s in-house IT and Data Engineering team was already at capacity,, so they contacted Snowflake,, who referred them to phData. The two organizations have become reliable partners because phData has extensive experience in performing Snowflake migrations and enablements.
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