Introduction
Our client, a leading delivery service provider in Europe and North America, experienced a rapid rise in the number of parcels to be delivered. The need for coordination of international deliveries and the increase in parcel quantities placed considerable demands on the client’s data and BI infrastructure and revealed the inefficiency of having separate ERP systems and reporting solutions for various countries.
The Challenge
Disparate ERP and reporting solutions
Our client needed to replace their fragmented, country-specific ERP and reporting environment with an integrated ERP service and build a comprehensive BI solution, complete with self-service capabilities, upon the new ERP foundation. To ensure accurate tracking of the entire delivery process for every package, the BI solution needed to be in line with the end-to-end processes in the centralized ERP.
The Objective
Accurate and timely insights for decision-makers
Our client identified three key areas for development:
- Consolidated management and reportability of international financial accounts
- Rapid and uninterrupted flow of information to cross-border support areas
- A new data warehouse to provide consolidated delivery data and serve more than 300 reports
In addition, historical data had to be available for each country of operation, with segregated visibility and availability of business data at the country and organizational unit level.
The Solution
A unified operational framework
HCLTech analyzed each business area’s reporting requirements and mapped the source system operation and data model in parallel.
- Designed and engineered an on-premises data warehouse with a data lake to provide centralized, cost-effective storage of data from multiple systems and a data mart tailored to the client’s environment
- Developed reports and dashboards, organized a series of data model presentations and conducted Power BI training for core users to promote the adoption of an in-house standard reporting tool and prepare the client’s analysts to transition to self-service reporting
- Enabled the daily loading of new data from the source systems into the data warehouse
- Improved data load scheduling and monitoring by leveraging Airflow technology
- Migrated all historical data from the previous ERP environment
- Implemented Tabular models to enhance the solution’s resilience and accommodate ad hoc reporting
The Impact
Better decisions via streamlined, self-service reporting
The project introduced a comprehensive upgrade to our client’s existing BI environment, with a unified ERP and reporting solution. Over 300 reports and multiple dashboards were ready for business use from day one. The solution enabled the daily loading of accurate, granular data from various countries into the data lake layer and provided access to comprehensive historical data from the last two years.
The BI training, coaching and support services helped key users to perform tasks autonomously and resulted in more effective reporting. After the project’s conclusion, the client extended their engagement with HCLTech to extend and optimize the solution.
