Manufacturing · Trusted Data Platform
A data lake that put decisions ahead of the data.
Annual savings$360k/yr
Context
A heavy-machinery dealer's leadership was frustrated by how long it took to collect, analyze, and visualize data on request. Answers often arrived after the decision had already been made. The trigger for action: management discovered that three full-time employees were doing nothing but updating existing reports by hand.
The problem
- 01Every new executive dashboard or analytical request took weeks to complete.
- 02Reporting depended on slow, error-prone manual data preparation.
- 03The existing data architecture was actively holding back growth.
What we did
- 01Mapped every source feeding the existing reports and built a single, reliable data catalog.
- 02Stood up a data lake on MS Azure and connected all business applications, with data refreshed daily.
- 03Migrated all existing reports onto the data lake, with scheduled daily dataset updates surfaced through MS Power BI.
- 04Introduced a self-service process so business analysts could work directly against the new architecture and get the most from it.
Results
- 01Average analytical request turnaround dropped from 5 days to 4 hours — decision-making moved to a different speed entirely.
- 02$360,000 saved per year by removing manual data operations.
- 03Growth-inhibiting architecture replaced by an expandable system.