Eurowag Built a Data Lake in the Cloud in under a Year
Eurowag transformed its data management and analytics capabilities by creating a cloud-based data lake within a year, significantly advancing towards data democratization and earning a Microsoft Award in 2022 for its innovative approach.
source systems
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databases incorporated into a single data lakehouse
No More Compromising and Waiting for Reports
Eurowag Group is a holding company that is continuously growing, innovating and progressing to boost its strong position as a leader on the European market. Eurowag seeks to do this in a number of ways:
- Acquiring new companies into the Group,
- Digitalizing processes for partners and customers,
- Streamlining internal and external processes,
- Introducing modern technologies,
- Regularly launching new products and services.
The on-prem solution that Eurowag had been operating was now longer able to handle any one of these activities effectively.
Business’ Frustration before our Solution
- The inability to combine data sources at the Eurowag Group level
- The unanswered need for personalized analytics reflecting the corporate strategy
- Long delivery times for reports
- Problems with accelerating financial closes
- Forced compromises in data analysis
- The expanding number of reports and the lack of transparency among individual metrics
- The growing costs of connecting additional data sources
Data Platform won Microsoft Awards 2022
The Adastra project for Eurowag started with a data strategy, followed by migration to the cloud, the basics of data analytics for vehicles and the fundamentals of corporate reporting, and finally, the data lake.
For a large-scale project that is bearing fruit and will reach many more fruits to come, Adastra received a Microsoft Award in 2022.
New Data Platform in the Cloud Launched within a Year
The project’s initiation took about a year. In that time, Eurowag and Adastra together were able to:
- Design, approve and implement a company-wide data architecture,
- Build a data platform in the cloud,
- Migrate the original on-prem solution to the new environment,
- Launch personalized analytics,
- Begin implementing new Enterprise-Level KPI reporting, and
- Begin optimizing data management processes.
Gradually, various technical and business challenges were overcome – from scaling the environment’s performance correctly, to convincing key business users to let go of some deep-rooted ideas about reporting in order to open the door to much more modern data analytics. The demands on the knowledge and experience of internal and external data teams have changed.
A company-wide data science discipline has been established at Eurowag, aimed at democratizing data across the company.
Adastra is Our Data-savvy Partner
According to Václav Dorazil from Eurowag, teamwork is crucial for completing the project. However, internal IT is strong enough to keep communication transparent so everyone knows what is happening and the next steps.
As an implementation partner, Adastra helped Eurowag through the challenging changes throughout the project.
Eurowag Has a Production Version of the Platform Available and Can Immediately Utilize the First Results
The Cloud and the Data Lake Will Allow Us to Create Data Models Quickly and Easily
Initially, there was a data strategy, followed by migration to the cloud, the basics of data analytics for vectors, and the basics of corporate reporting. Before completion, there is a data lake, and everything is moving toward data democratization.
- How to define a proper data strategy?
- How to successfully migrate from on-premise to the cloud?
- How do the cloud and data lake help companies?
- What are the benefits of data democratization?
Listen to the podcast (in Czech) with Václav Dorazil, Head of Data at Eurowag, or read it as an interview (in English).
Eurowag on the Way to Data Democratisation
Still to Come on Eurowag and Adastra’s Common Journey:
- Revise, redesign and implement data models to simplify and streamline the original corporate reporting, focused primarily on the financial/accounting view.
- Connect a plethora of new data sources, bringing disparate data to the people who need them for their daily work. There is already a huge appetite for high-volume data from GPS sensors on individual clients’ trucks, tachograph data, etc.
- Implement a new BI (reporting) tool that will support the company’s vision of data democratization, allowing everyone to use guaranteed data sources and create their own reports in just a few clicks.
- Complete company-wide reporting whose goal is not only to measure key KPIs but also to give all departments and teams the ability to track and analyze their progress against those KPIs.
Gradually roll out Data Governance:
- Steadily building and defining a data catalog,
- Defining and measuring data quality,
- Proposing changes to the overall technology architecture to improve data quality,
- Defining individuals’ and teams’ rights, responsibility and ownership for the data entity lifecycle,
- Analyzing and adapting business processes.
Six Months Would Take Us the Truck Analysis On-premise
We evaluate cloud costs in terms of long-term benefits and lost profits.
- What motivated Eurowag to the cloud migration?
- Why was a quick migration preferable to a gradual transition?
- How was the cloud solution implemented within the company?
- What was the cost of this strategy?
- What was the key to a successful migration to the cloud?
- What data models they can create now?
- Single point of truth – is this an overrated concept?
- What are the pros/cons of data democratization?
- How is data quality being maintained?
- What are the next steps for Eurowag?
Five Steps to a Successful Data Strategy According to Václav Dorazil
- Have a long-term vision and architecture. Don’t do things randomly.
- Create data models and have a single point of truth.
- Invest in data quality.
- Work as a team. Data is not just about technology.
- Have fun with it, it’s not all work!
