DATA LAKES AND WAREHOUSES – LOGISTICS
Logistics Provider Improves Decision-Making with a New Modern Data Architecture.
Overview
Our client, a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, focused on helping businesses handle their e-commerce order fulfillment and retail distribution, has fulfillment centers strategically located across the nation to reduce order transit time.
The client has multiple warehouse management systems (WMS) for inventory management and for monitoring warehouse activities such as receiving, putaway, picking, packing, and shipping. Multiple Warehouse Management systems from different vendors resulted in data silos and data inconsistencies creating delays in enterprise-wide reporting.
They needed a solution that would consolidate their data, reduce maintenance overhead, and allow them to scale in size as their data needs continued to grow.
Our Solution
One Six implemented a solution that utilizes modern cloud data architecture to reduce maintenance overhead as well as allow the client to scale in size as their data needs continued to grow.
The solution consisted of replicating all the data from various operational systems into a Data Lake. A Data Warehouse was designed to consolidate all data into a centralized location designed for easier access, analysis, and reporting.
One Six Solutions took advantage of many powerful cloud data platforms to create the appropriate best-of-breed solution for our client:
Snowflake’s data platform was leveraged to create a highly secure, scalable Data Lake and Data Warehouse environment
Fivetran provided resilient data pipelines sourcing data from multiple WMS systems and loading data into the Data Lake, saving time and money on data engineering development
Matillion was the transformation and orchestration engine for building the enterprise data model in the Data Warehouse
Tableau provided executive dashboards and customer-facing reporting across the firm driving actionable insights and trends
The Results
With this single source of truth (the cloud Data Warehouse), the organization was able to generate comprehensive reporting on KPIs that allowed the business to look at these numbers with confidence to support strategic decision-making.
The operations team utilized these reports generated from the Data Warehouse for inventory planning to reduce the risk of stockouts and identify demand patterns. The facility managers utilized the reports to identify inefficiencies in warehouse activities to improve the order fulfillment turnaround time.
