Giant Real Estate Firm Utilizes Snowflake for Rapid Data Center Replication
Customer's Challenge
A giant real estate investment trust that manages 30 international data centers, supporting the Top 5 major technology companies, sought to optimize their reporting processes that fueled the building of new data centers. Historically, the process has been very complex, involving extensive revenue forecasting related to companies’ pre-purchasing space before the build-out. Previously, the customer utilized a manual, multi-touchpoint process involving a cloud-based Excel-like document called Smartsheet. The customer surmises that a more automated system could be leveraged to procure the necessary reports, requiring less manual labor and improving accuracy.
phData's Solution
phData conducted a 6-week strategy engagement with the customer to identify opportunities to improve their reporting processes. They found that the customer relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets and manual processes to generate a critical financial report, which was the sole responsibility of one accountant.
phData proposed implementing a Snowflake-based data platform to automate the generation of this financial report. This involved leveraging tools like Fivetran and dbt to ingest data from various sources like Workday and Salesforce and then delivering the report through a Tableau interface. The goal was to increase the speed and accuracy of the reporting process while establishing a single source of truth for the company as a whole.
Results
The new reporting solution significantly reduced the time required to generate the ‘All Contract Detail’ report from 10-15 days to just a few minutes. Now fully automated, the report is less susceptible to human error and more accessible to its stakeholders. With phData’s guidance, the customer has also invested in building out their internal data engineering team. This demonstrates the customer’s commitment to the new data platform and their recognition of its value.
The Full Story
What started as a six-week strategy engagement centered on delivering more efficient reporting developed into a six-month relationship between the customer and phData. The strategy engagement led to the discovery of the most consumed financial report that the customer was generating containing details for all contracts. This report was shared throughout the company and was the sole responsibility of one of their accountants to generate, validate, and distribute. The phData team identified this report as an excellent use case for implementing engineering around to leverage Snowflake. The scope would involve a variety of data sources like Workday, Salesforce, and some internal Excel documents.
The phData team implemented the medallion architecture within Snowflake, leaning on various facilitation tools such as FiveTran, dbt, and Snowpipe. Tableau was also incorporated to deliver self-service reporting functionality for less technical stakeholders. The new architecture increased the speed of report generation and improved the reporting accuracy. Additionally, it eliminated the need for a manually-maintained Excel document, which improved the trustworthiness of the data.
One of the biggest challenges of the engagement was ensuring proper data synchronization between the various source systems all the while maintaining the same level of quality expected when produced by hand. While phData was able to implement the core reporting solution, they are continuing to work on fully integrating all the relevant data sources to deliver a seamless end-to-end process.
Throughout and beyond the engagement, phData has maintained a strong, ongoing partnership with the client, serving as a trusted advisor and extension of their internal team. In addition to the data engineering work, phData has also guided the customer’s operating model and the types of roles they should hire to support their data initiatives long-term.
Why phData?
The customer had recently completed a six-week strategy engagement with phData, centered on reporting efficiency, which showcased phData’s expertise. The project’s next phase took the learnings from the initial engagement and put them into action, showcasing the strategy implementation on the use case of the ‘All Contract Detail” report.
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