From Delta Air Lines who invested over $100 million in airport baggage systems to significantly improve its baggage handling processes, to Netflix who used real-time data analytics and subscriber data to transform into a number one streaming platform in the world, organizations are increasingly bringing real-time advanced analytics into their strategy room.
Real-time data analytics have transformed how organizations unlock the full value of previously unrecognized data, enabling them to leverage these insights for improved decision-making and operational changes. However, smart decisions cannot be made without the right information to act on. This is where a partner like BlueCloud comes to the stage.
Our client, a full-service sales and marketing agency, understood this necessity. They needed a solution that would allow them and their clients to analyze their data more intuitively without relying on IT teams for every new report or visualization.
The goal?
- Unlock the untapped potential of data for enhanced data visibility and advanced decision-making
- Improve data management
- Provide a seamless user experience through powerful user-friendly visual dashboards
They approached BlueCloud to help them modernize their legacy reporting systems and enhance their insights with easy-to-use modern cloud technology for data visualization.
This article describes how BlueCloud combined our deep expertise in data engineering, data analytics and business intelligence to create a strong foundation framework and offer a comprehensive self-service BI solution, helping the client and their end-users to democratize and navigate data more easily, detect anomalies before it is too late and make informed decisions.
The Foundation Framework: Building Data-Centric Future
BlueCloud developed a foundation framework to transform the client’s approach to analytics, integrating a data warehouse for handling large datasets and a business intelligence (BI) platform for easy, real-time data visualization.
This project included a wide range of use cases for the client’s end-users, spanning multiple industries, from retail groceries to pharmacy. We worked with diverse datasets, including financial and HR data, making this a comprehensive project with multiple unique components tailored to the different end user needs.
Moving forward, we will explore the steps we took to build the solution and explain what we did and what we found out along the way.
Overcoming Data Challenges
Our clients pride themselves on delivering real-time insights to the customers they serve through data-driven analytics, helping to drive efficient and impactful decision-making. However, they faced a challenge: their heavy reliance on Excel files and outdated file-based reporting systems caused their internal and client-facing teams to struggle to access and visualize data efficiently.
Also, the BI tools previously in place, lacked the flexibility for users to create self-service reports, limiting the ability to explore data on demand. These tools also struggled with unstructured data, which slowed down reporting and made data accuracy a challenge.
The first step was to move the client from a file-based system to a modern cloud warehouse. Using Python & Scala notebooks together with SQL, the team transformed the data into a structured format suitable for advanced analytics. The BlueCloud team managed to automate and optimize data ingestion, cleaning, and structuring, creating a scalable and organized data model.
Empowering Real-Time Data Analytics with Business Intelligence
While data analytics can help reveal predictions and future trends, business intelligence can help with decision making based on historical data. By implementing the right BI tool, the data will be illustrated in a meaningful way and then can be distribute to the right people at the right time. The synergy of the two can empower organizations to achieve an unprecedented level of speed, scale and granularity.
BlueCloud dedicated team of experts supported the implementation of an AI-powered Business Intelligence (BI) tool that allows users to ask any data questions in natural language, get accurate answers and take immediate actions.
With a proper data model in place, BlueCloud then utilized the BI tool’s capabilities to create live, dynamic reports. These reports enabled users to easily drill down into specific data points, such as regional sales trends, top vendors, or underperforming products, and provided advanced filtering options to refine their analysis. The client could now track their performance metrics in real-time, ensuring they could react swiftly to changes in market demand or vendor performance.
Empowering End Users with Self-Service BI: Democratizing Sales Data for a Retail Company
BlueCloud recognized that delivering accurate data was essential, but equally important was making that data clear and accessible to all users—both the client’s internal teams and their customers. One of the client’s end-users, a retail company operating stores across the U.S., needed this clarity to drive decision-making.
They needed insights from their sales data to make strategic decisions on product distribution, vendor performance, and store operations.
BlueCloud’s foundation framework addressed this challenge by connecting the data warehouse as the backend data store and BI tool as the front-end visualization tool. The result was a real-time dashboard showcasing key insights such as sales trends, top-performing manufacturers and products, year-over-year and weekly comparisons based on a custom fiscal calendar, as well as weekly trends of Digital and In-Store sales. This dashboard can be filtered by vendor, manufacturer, division, and other criteria based on end-user selection, allowing for personalized analysis.
On top of this, AI-driven search capabilities in the BI tool help users answer critical business questions more quickly, streamlining decision-making processes.
The dashboard allows sales managers, executives, and data analysts to track sales metrics, including top 10 products by sales, percentage changes in sales in real time.
Instead of toggling between multiple sources of data, users can now access a single source of truth in the dashboard, improving accuracy and decision-making speed. For instance, by comparing sales metrics from the current year with previous years, users could identify patterns and trends. If a specific product was underperforming compared to the previous year, managers could investigate the root causes and make adjustments, whether that meant renegotiating vendor terms, adjusting stock levels, or changing marketing strategies.
The added value wasn’t limited to reporting capabilities; BlueCloud also developed control dashboards to track anomalies, ensure data accuracy and quickly resolve any issues before they impacted business decisions.
This self-service model shifted the reliance from IT teams to end users, giving them autonomy in their decision-making processes.
Transitioning Legacy Reporting Systems to a Modern Data Infrastructure
The self-service BI capabilities enabled the client and their end-users to filter data, create new visualizations, and explore insights relevant to their specific needs. For example, a marketing manager could filter data by product category to understand which products were driving sales in certain regions, while an HR manager could explore employee performance metrics to optimize resource allocation.
By building a solid foundation framework, BlueCloud successfully transitioned the legacy systems to a modern data infrastructure that not only enhanced data accuracy and availability but also revolutionized how their users interact with data, making that data accessible and meaningful to every user.
How can BlueCloud Help you Transform Business Operations with Modern Data Analytics?
The project success is a testament to how modern data analytics can help organizations lead in the data-driven future. However, there are still many companies struggling with building and leveraging diverse analytical solutions while heavily relying on IT when working with intelligent data platforms.
BlueCloud stands at the forefront of data-led transformation supporting companies in developing analytical and self-service BI solutions that strengthen their business decisions and democratize data across all organizational levels.
Explore our Data Engineering and Data Analytics services to learn how you can holistically derive insights and make informed decisions.
