Customer story – Bob Collie
Lights on data modernization podcast
What we really liked about Lyftrondata was the fact that we didn’t have to describe the data first but what we were able to do is just say that here’s a source and here’s a destination and it really has a way.
Bob Collie – Chief Technology Advisor at Zmclp & Board Member at IT Renew.
About Bob
Bob attended Vanderbilt University pursuing a degree in economics. He currently represents ZMC on the Board of IT Renew. He works with the management teams at AdThrive, which was formerly known as Dynasty Sports and Entertainment and Education Networks of America. He has over 20 years of experience in leadership, strategy and technology implementation. He has also served in a variety of roles including as Chief Technology Officer and as Senior Vice President of Strategy with Education Networks of America, PsiNet, and Tele-link Corporation.
The company
Founded in 2001, ZMC has deep experience in executing private equity investments in the media & communications industry. ZMC’s investment philosophy is one of passion and partnership. Having a great conviction for investments, ZMC works closely with its portfolio companies to build value collectively. ITRenew is one of ZMC’s portfolio companies and for more than two decades, has been maximizing the lifetime value of data center technology through innovative circular economic models and a comprehensive portfolio of decommissioning and data security services, edge and component products, and rack-scale compute and storage solutions. With operations in all major data center markets, ITRenew delivers best-of-breed decommissioning, data security, engineering, and remanufacturing services on a truly global basis. Based in Silicon Valley, ITRenew has continuously innovated, designed, and customized solutions in collaboration with the largest hyper-scale data centers in the world..
The challenge
IT Renew has an internal proprietary system called Wits. It is based on SQL server and helps validate what comes in. The company has to ensure that data goes back to the clients who are actually furnishing them the equipment on a consignment basis to ensure that their equipment is marketed well.
Data is the single most important factor that helps IT Renew know, measure, and analyse its equipment to maximise value for clients and the company itself. All this data is present in the underlying systems which have a layer of Microsoft Business Central 365 over it. The sales team uses Salesforce to understand products and the work done with the hyperscalers. The main challenge is to maintain a balance between supply, demand and pricing. Accordingly, the company faced the following challenges:
Access to information and digital adoption for employees
Data came from different places and had to be made available in Tableau and Wits. This also included dynamic data along with other vital parameters that help the company save costs, channelize labour for enhanced productivity, and whether or not to modify, sell, or discard products.
Deploying
Even after deploying Business Central in the Dynamics 365 environment, there was no way to feed that into a data warehouse. The company then tried to use Power Automate to move components over in the back end into an sql data warehouse in Azure but quality was a major issue.
User-friendly
Although Power Automate could be a very user-friendly option for easier work, for IT Renew it did not serve the purpose as there was no actual way for a data analyst to understand data and take a new data pipeline to the warehouse to suit the dynamic needs.
How Lyftrondata helped?
The company principally uses Lyftrondata for data transformation. Lyftrondata seamlessly connected all components together. It helped to eliminate the time consuming process of building custom codes and training the team.
With Lyftrondata, their team in Tableau easily create automated data pipelines from Business Central, Salesforce, and Witz to gather and analyse data quickly. The work of the data analysts was simplified to a great extent as the gap between the data source and data destination was bridged by Lyftrondata and helped give incremental loads, to which Bob further stated-
” The onboarding was very fast and the nice part of it is we did not have to involve a deeper set of our IT team to do that “, says Bob who further explains that it took less than 2 weeks to on board with Lyftrondata and did not require any tedious efforts from the team to start working with it. The company just had to put the ETL capabilities in the hands of the respective persons and departments and work was simplified!
“Lyftrondata team already had good adapters for Salesforce so we were able to get there in a matter of minutes frankly.Once our team connected to the salesforce instance and got the security credentials, we didn’t need a data architect or an ETL developer. What we have is somewhere between a data analyst and a BI analyst. This team was able to suck in the data directly from Salesforce and create very meaningful reports against it in our data warehouse in a day.” –Bob Collie
Bob mentioned:
Further, Bob explains that:
Lyftrondata helped extract, transform, and load data into the target warehouse effortlessly. Also, manual efforts of report drafting and maintenance were automated to save time. Data transformation was no more a hurdle as the entire process took a few minutes, irrespective of the number of rows and columns. The ETL architecture aligned perfectly with the needs of the company while working with the cloud. Moreover, it was very easy to make changes to the data and insert updates about particular products without disturbing the workflow.
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