Tirecheck’s Azure Cloud-Based Data Warehousing and Reporting Modernization

Background and Challenge Story

Tirecheck (known as Tirecheck in the USA) offers a complete professional tire management system and can equip you with gauges capable of automatically reading and transferring your tire data to the appropriate database: an ideal service for tire producers and dealers, garages, or for managing a bus line, a trucking company, even your corporate car fleet.

Tirecheck customers can be found all over the world and with every customer having its database in the cloud, some reports were overloading source databases and making it difficult to provide joint reporting. The company realized that a Data Warehouse (DWH) redesign was needed and after some preliminary work, Tirecheck ran into many technical problems which were beyond their scope. At this point they called Adastra.

Adastra was asked to help Tirecheck with two areas in particular:

• to find an appropriate reporting tool to cover all databases and to provide easier reporting and better dashboards.
• to redesign the existing DWH solution which consisted of several independent data warehouses (each representing a single Tirecheck customer). Today there are 35 DWHs, a number that will grow in the future as the number of Tirecheck’s customers increase.

Solution Story

Initially, we focused on designing a new DWH to fulfill present requirements and to consolidate all customers and their related data. We customized the DWH on an MS Azure platform for each Tirecheck customer. MS Azure runs on Microsoft’s global datacenter network. The MS Azure cloud platform is geographically redundant and virtually ensures high data availability (SLA 99.9 %). Data are easily and quickly accessible and can be readily and transparently reported. This is a boon for Tirecheck and its customers as they rely on data security and scalability: services can quickly scale up or down to match planned and unplanned demands.

All customers now have their own tailor-made dashboard to meet their needs and expectations as data are designed just for them. Tirecheck chose DataZen as its reporting tool and Adastra’s consultants competently integrated it into a Tirecheck web environment incl. single sign-on request.

Although separate databases are not huge (Adastra is capable of working with hundreds of millions, even billions of records and there are only millions of records), the multiple databases of Tirecheck were located around the globe in different time zones. While servers physically placed in Europe communicate with each other quickly, connecting to a server physically placed in America or Asia takes slightly more time, but the lag is insignificant and fully satisfies Tirecheck and its customers.

Impact

The project was successfully finished and passed on to our customer with the first dashboards designed for Tirecheck’s largest customers. After presenting sample dashboards to its customers, Tirecheck discussed specific forms of dashboards and designed simplifications to suit each customer better (the less data displayed, the more transparent the dashboard and the better the view in mobile applications). Data are loaded on a day-to-day basis.

Key project benefits are:

• Loading procedures from Stage to DWH are managed by metadata and associated parameters (a generated procedure can do this for selected customers). Tirecheck specializes in using several DWHs (35 today with more to come in the future). Using an Adastra engine to generate ETL procedures would result in an unnecessary conflation of metadata and generated procedures (35 times), so Adastra adapted the engine to do everything once and to manage procedures by parameters.
• Average loading time for one customer database is 5 minutes.