Ascend managed the project and driving the change together with the client’s development team

The client, a global manufacturing company, wanted to provide a single source of data readily available for different consumption use cases. The idea was to bring consistency and simplify data consumption by ensuring that all consumers have access to the same data sets. This required developing a “data lake” which ingested data from key sources throughout the organization. Ascend supported the client by managing the project and driving the change together with the client’s development team.

As a strategic initiative, the central IT department’s vision was to provide a single source of data that was cleansed, consistent, and readily available for consumption for reporting, dashboards, and other use cases. 

This required developing a data lake that ingested data from crucial sources throughout the organization’s system landscape. Main benefits for the project included: 

• Removing/avoiding unnecessary work and complex dependencies for the future consumption of data 

• No application-to-application integration for consumption of data, which is bad design and creates dependency and costs related to upgrades on either side
• Any change of source system means to change only for the data lake; feeding systems will require minimal to no change
• Planned data consumption includes data warehouses, chatbots, robotics, business intelligence through dashboards and reporting. Using a single source ensures that all consumers have access to the same data sets, bringing consistency throughout the organization. 

Ascend’s role was to drive and manage the project by leading the development team with solution/system architects and database developers. The project was sequenced into two phases:

1) Design & development of a solution. This phase included ingestion of primary data sources and establishing the data lake as a service.

2) Enrichment of data sets and ingestion of new sources. This phase also included the development of dashboards and reporting, which targeted two areas:

• Automation of existing reporting that is created manually
• Creating reporting with new insights which had previously not been possible when data sets had existed in isolation. 

The project was successful; data lake was launched as a service, and multiple use cases were realized within a short period of its inception. The project’s success factors were that Ascend provided a deep understanding of the data and the quality of the information. This enabled great results and accuracy to be ensured in the data lake, which facilitates efficient decision-making through data consumption.