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Achieving corporate agility through data & analytics

How one real estate company enabled corporate agility to gain valuable and actionable insights through data and analytics.

Challenge

Most organizations are brimming with data. Information about customers, products, services, and more. All this data can be a treasure trove to companies by allowing them to customize customer experiences and improve internal efficiencies. But, without the right strategy and technology, data can remain nothing more than a digital paperweight, providing little valuable insight for companies to act on.

Our client, a large real estate investment firm, wanted more from their data. They were burdened by extensive manual data entry, multiple systems that held different information, and delays with reporting and analytics. They were also dealing with their data storage. Their on-premise infrastructure about to reach capacity, so they knew it was time to act. Like many companies, they found themselves asking if now was the time to move to the cloud.

Ultimately, their goal was simple: enable corporate agility by implementing a platform that would ultimately allow them to gain valuable, actionable insights through data and analytics. Now they just needed the right tools and expertise to get there.

Solution

Cloud Solution

We started with an assessment of their existing system and data sources to determine requirements for a data platform that would better provide stakeholders with the insights they need. Our client was looking at different cloud options and wanted to ensure their platform decision would work with their existing systems and allow them to improve their current processes. More than just a new implementation, our client needed the right data strategy in place that would allow them to meet their new business goals.

Based on interviews with stakeholders and the results of the platform evaluation, we ultimately recommended a hybrid cloud model that would work with their existing infrastructure, utilizing Azure as a cloud solution and the Snowflake data platform. We created a roadmap that prioritized options for building out their data and technology strategy and a plan for getting from the current state to the updated future state.

Implementation & Proof of Concept

Armed with the recommendation and roadmap, this investment firm was ready for implementation. We worked with them to:

Build out the new data architecture, data model, and ingest processes
Identify and integrate new data sources into their analytics environment
Create and refine data governance processes and information

After the client was able to store and manage their data more effectively, we worked with them to develop dashboards and analytics reporting that would give them the insights they needed to make informed business decisions. Given its analytics and visualization capabilities, automation functions, and ease of customization, we knew that Power BI was the right tool for this client’s analytics needs.

Because this real estate investment firm focuses on shopping malls, data from their shoppers was critical. They wanted to be able to track how well their properties were engaging with customers via different social media channels. We engaged with their marketing department to build out a dashboard pulling data from Facebook, Instagram, Chatmeter, marketing email interactions, and more.

Outcomes

The platform assessment and new hybrid cloud implementation were critical first steps to understanding what this client’s needs were and finding a solution that didn’t overhaul their systems or business processes, but instead leveraged was what already working for them, and improved on things that weren’t.

For their marketing team, now all of their social media data is in one place. Not only can the social media managers at each mall location better understand and improve interactions with their own customers, but executive leadership now has far-reaching insights across all of the mall locations. And all of that data is readily accessible and easily reportable — there is no more wasting valuable time and resources on tedious manual data entry.

Now, with success within their marketing department, the rollout and expansion of the new cloud-based business intelligence and analytics environment is being rolled out and expanded to other areas of the organization with confidence in their data quality and insights.