Reconfigurable modern data framework orchestration becomes a great fit to the dynamic today
~ Written by Explora CEO Dora Tse
One of the business trends nowadays is facing the dynamic in both the business world and consumer’s market, things are moving extremely faster and become more real-time everyday. With economical changes after pandemic, what reacts to this is the new business normal, the frequent change of business priorities and lack of workers. All these challenges seem to bring in more disruption to business. As a result, company facing organization changes would keep adding and shuffling responsibilities among roles and people to balance the business needs, and that can lead to endless change of data owners, frequent update of business rules and data sources affecting our reports and insight. Due to the dynamic, people who retain in the position may not be the same people who know the history of the data and business, and they would end up raising more business questions with their stakeholders, peers, customers and executive. In this case, is the data still satisfying their newer questions and concern every day?
With this situation, standardizing data structure seems harder for an organization. I think as long as there is a storage on the data people need is already meant a luxury thing to say. Speaking about users who are busy generating reports and insights may find difficulty to tell the difference between data in excel and data being pulled from a centralizing data platform, questions they have in mind now are what are reports? What are insights? They start struggling about what data can offer to the business with business value. As a matter of fact, these stakeholders and business users start concerning the data quality coming from the place they extract data from or they read the data on.
Our customer “Plaza Premium Group” (PPG) who serves many airport locations facing multiple time zones and multiple currency encounters the similar challenge about data and insight before and the data usually involves more than 20 different data sources in various forms, the quality control and data governance weren’t enough before especially data involving external systems can be complex. Like other companies, PPG is facing labor constraint and remaining staffs find challenges to follow every best practice before submitting their work because they already tied up fully to day-to-day operation. Thus, the data quality control became inconsistent which they realize it’s a right time to strengthen the foundation and improve the governance so that they can respond faster to the business more rapidly and accurately.
With Explora, AWS and Databricks solutions, we enable PPG to utilize the data lakehouse platform for modern plug-and-play capability with various form of data sources which now takes them only one day to add in new and simple data sources every time and take another five days most to integrate with more complex data sources such as ERP, CRM and Loyalty. Their organization can now release new or upgraded BI report pages weekly in average which is much faster than before. The purpose of such flexibility is to quickly respond to the dynamic when business is need of data source schema changes without causing data lag for data refresh or manual interruption. The centralizing data mapping and business logics serve the business vision of PPG and it offers the key value of self-service capability. The upgrading of dataset will not affect existing dashboards or reports made from existing dataset so we lower the business impact in any way. Under the self-service environment, report users do not need to know the source system schema like before and they can directly handle the dataset when serving their individual interest in data across the business cases they want to see or not want to see.
The five tiers of data layers we have built with PPG accelerate performance and deepen value creation. What made life easier for PPG is that they only require one configuration data extraction setting when integrating new data source, we call it reconfigurable and modern data framework orchestration. This entails the state of the art in data technology PPG has succeeded by linking their vision with technology they fully utilize to amplify the value of flexibility and reusability. The best side of the data integrity coming from historical data never get to change even data source contain some back-date adjustment because we have streamlined the audit trailing mechanism in the new data platform. Forward looking with forecasting and predictive data analytics made users much easier in the new data platform without requiring too in-depth of advanced algorithm, being simple and faster to market is the important milestone PPG has made with Explora, Databricks and AWS. This partnership helps us share values, build trust and foster a strong sense of collaboration to help us succeed in business at many ways.
