Situation
Even though most businesses are drowning in data in this new digital age, most are woefully short of business insight from this data. The challenge isn’t capturing this data – it’s being able to swiftly and efficiently transform it into actionable intelligence. Being able to derive insight from every byte of data means the business is informed which ultimately will impact how successful it it.
Our client, one of the largest distributors of fuel and lubricants in the UK, was in just this predicament – it had access to large quantities of data but wasn’t able to derive actionable insights to help it manage supply and demand of its products and operate more effectively.
Approach
Valcon, using Microsoft Fabric, built a state-of-the-art data pipeline for our client to conduct cutting-edge data processing. Valcon’s expertise and accelerators ensured that the proof of concept directed raw data from APIs (application protocol interfaces) to business analytics systems and machine learning training models in just a few weeks.
The powerful, joined-up nature of Microsoft Fabric’s tooling and infrastructure enabled Valcon to implement the pipeline across a number of development, testing and production environments, which speeded up the pipeline’s readiness.
Valcon used ‘medallion architecture,’ an industry bronze, silver and gold standard to categorise incoming data to ensure data quality and usability at every stage. The bronze stage is the ingesting of raw data in its original form; silver is the cleansing and standardisation of the data and gold is the refining and aggregating of the data from multiple incoming sources to deliver to analytical systems.
Results
Valcon’s approach of building a data pipeline using Microsoft Fabric has proved to be extremely beneficial. Some of the key benefits include:
- Turning data into strategic assets: the Microsoft Fabric data pipeline not only streamlines data processes but turns data into a highly beneficial strategic business asset.
- Shortening development cycles and reduce time to market: with the use of accelerators – proprietary methodologies and tools – Valcon has been able to shorten development cycles and reduce the time to market for delivery of actionable data to data analytics consumers.
- Keeping costs down: a key concern with cloud-based solutions is cost-control. Microsoft Fabric uses cost-management strategies and automation to ensure the right sized resources are deployed based on demand, which minimises waste.
- Informing business decisions: the Microsoft Fabric data pipeline ensures that all users – data engineers, data analysts and scientists and business users – benefit from increased data quality and integrity and have real time access to data insights to make informed decisions.
