Client background

This company is one of the nation’s largest wholesale distributors of roofing, siding, windows and other select exterior and interior building products, tools and related supplies. They have grown to become a national organization with facilities in 49 states.

The business challenge

The client was in the process of implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and needed to maintain continuity of operations and availability of data as individual branches transition from the original system to the new ERP. In addition, the company needed to plan for the sunsetting of legacy databases and business reports dependent on that original system, while ensuring employees and customers continue to have the information they require for decision-making.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly's digital team supplemented the client’s software engineering team within the client’s data science department. The team was then tasked with developing a modern data warehouse on a cloud-based tool set, including Azure Data Lake, Azure Data Factory, Databricks and Snowflake. Our professionals employed an Agile-based approach with the development team, enabling the broader engineering team and business stakeholders to have granular visibility into progress and priorities.

The Baker Tilly team was responsible for:

• Collecting requirements from stakeholders utilizing the BEAM methodology
• Developing data model designs for specific domains, such as sales, inventory and finance
• Creating datasets in Tableau and maintaining related documentation, including user guides and data dictionaries
• Performing data sourcing, orchestration, staging and transformation
• Implementing separate QA and staging environments to accommodate integrated testing and QA processes in the development lifecycle

The benefits to the client included:

• The ability to provide curated datasets to their business users for self-service, allowing users to begin sunsetting their legacy reports and creating new versions in Tableau
• A branch-by-branch migration to the new ERP system that will be able to include the datasets to allow for a comprehensive view of the business, regardless of source system