G-Star
Next level BI
Free Frogs guided G-Star in developing a 24/7 available, near real time, Global Data Warehouse. G-Star BICC is now able to fulfill the needs of their worldwide customers much quicker, better and more predictable.
G-Star’s old data warehouse did no longer meet requirements
For a small decade, G-Star’s worldwide branches have been using the G-Star Data Warehouse, to gain insight into all worldwide retail and wholesale data, including (web)shop data.
But over time, stability problems arose and malfunctions occurred. Data quality was lacking, information was not available quickly enough and the system was not as flexible as desired. It all led to high costs for G-Star and unhappy end users.
Free Frogs was asked to solve these problems.
The data warehouse needed to be rebuilt
An analysis by Free Frogs quickly showed that the data warehouse had become outdated. With changing demands and an abandoned original architecture, the only real option was to build a completely new data warehouse. All while keeping the old one running.
The number of incidents have been substantially reduced
Free Frogs worked together with the people from G-Star BICC and swiftly came up with a new architecture. After a lot of hard work, a completely new data warehouse is now available 24/7 and it holds data with a latency of 20 minutes. Data quality has improved drastically and G-Star BICC is now able to meet new user demands much faster.
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“Data quality and consistency have been improved. There are less incidents and issues are resolved much quicker.”
(Ton Nieuwenhuizen, BICC-Manager G-Star)
All improvements have been anchored within the organization
But progress calls for more than technical improvements. That is why Free Frogs also guided G-Star towards a new way of agile working. Users were helped to take the lead on prioritizing. The Free Frogs consultants were also able to gradually transfer their knowledge unto G-Star employees. Hereby ensuring the new work methods are well embedded in the organization.
Free Frogs ambition was to make themselves unnecessary by enabling an architecture with just enough complexity as needed and by facilitating knowledge transfer to G-star. Nowadays G-star is able to maintain and extend their datawarehouse completely by themselves. The only requirement is that the implemented architecture is secured and maintained.
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“The BICC’s ability to solve issues has been substantially improved”
(Ton Nieuwenhuizen, BICC-Manager G-Star)
Project summary
Results ➽
The project has achieved highly valued results:
- Global users are very satisfied with the near-realtime, 24/7 available information and the short Time to Market of new requests
- The new data warehouse meets G-Star’s requirements and fits the maturity of the organisation
- The G-Star team is capabable to continue on their own.
Objectives ➽
The prime objectives of the project were:
- Satisfied users
- Short Time to Market of changes
- Low TCO
- Knowledge development BICC
- Secured architecture by training and documentation
Approach ➽
We implemented a new way of agile working. Special attention was given to knowledge transfer and training the G-Star team in order to empower G-Star to continue by their own.
The new architecture supports the following non-functionals:
- Simplicity
- High-availability (24/7 online)
- Performance
- Near real-time data
- Automation (ETL/deployment)
- Compatibility with multiple interfaces
- Flexibel adjustable to changing source system
- Data quality
- Version control
Technology ➽
We have used fit-for-purpose technoly:
- SQL Server 2014 (high-availability)
- ETL-framework with ETL-automation
- Denormalized datamarts
- Near-Real-time switch-over of datamarts to garantuee low-latency
“It was great to do such an interesting project. I think we have done a good job with sustainable result for G-Star”
(Vincent Wylenzek, BI Architect Free Frogs)