Data Analytics Platform for Sales and Marketing Insights

Business challenge

Our client is one of the largest tire and rubber products manufacturers in the global automotive industry. To enable continuous development, the company needed a set of tools that would allow regional managers, marketers, and automotive big data analysts to process historical, current, and expected data and generate sales and marketing insights. This would facilitate more efficient resource allocation and decision-making in the company’s retail businesses. By teaming up with Intellias, our client created an advanced data analytics platform to drive sales in their European branch using a powerful combination of big data technology together with retail and automotive expertise.

The first iteration of the platform was developed by a third-party vendor working on our client’s basic cloud solution for data analysis. However, limited automation and scalability as well as the use of legacy technologies and a diverse tech stack stalled the evolution of the product. As the company wanted to step up to the next level by leveraging innovative technologies for data analysis and processing, they needed a seasoned technical partner with relevant experience. They chose Intellias to streamline and future-proof their existing solution based on our proven expertise in big data services, data engineering, and platform development.

Solution delivered

Our team of Scala developers and DevOps engineers are working hand in hand with our client’s data engineers and data analysts. We’re actively participating in planning sessions, the generation and discussion of new ideas, knowledge sharing, and decision-making. To date, our collaboration has resulted in a full-fledged big data analytics platform that has scaled many times over and increased data coverage from 1 to 18 European countries.

Successfully delivering across six development streams, our experienced engineers also act as technical experts by providing valuable consulting for our client. As the data analytics platform and its functional specifications constantly evolve, our client plans to expand our technical partnership by hiring more Intellias specialists.

The data analytics platform we’re working on comprises a broad set of tools for data engineering and data analysis in retail. It collects raw data from over 200 sources, sorts it out, transforms it, and presents results in the form of visual dashboards that can be refined, filtered, and combined to get precise insights into the company’s operations in order to inform business decisions.

So far, we’ve built four families of dashboards, granting several access levels to users and covering our client’s different channels and needs including B2B, B2C, customer performance assessment, and data quality. Having a valuable big data and analytics platform at hand helps our client ensure consistency across all retail processes and efficiently manage inventory.

During data analytics platform development, our team handled technological challenges such as building a proprietary framework for big data processing. This framework makes data available for analysis at each processing stage so users can gain analytical predictions and insights on the go.

Using our DevOps best practices, we also initiated the transition to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to promote high-level automation rather than error-prone manual processes as well as traceable configuration with minimal code changes, allowing for easy updates and server scaling. Moreover, the implementation of sustainable CI/CD streamlined the validation of our work at all stages of development and testing before going into production. These pertinent transitions ensured omnidirectional scalability of the product with minimum cost and a minimum of specialists.

Business outcome

With the aim of ensuring consistent, transparent, and centralized decision-making for their business, we helped our client develop a sophisticated data and analytics platform providing real-time visibility into operations and validating data. Powered by big data predictive analytics, this solution revealed unapproached opportunities for improving our client’s supply chain in specific regions and provided an understanding of where to allocate resources and increase sales efforts.

Besides aggregating and analyzing information, the data analytics platform being developed by the Intellias team represents data in a meaningful visual form using customizable dashboards that help define gaps on the coverage map and advise business, sales, and marketing experts on opportunities that have yet to be activated. Backed by reliable and verified data, this set of tools also provides inventory and sales predictions used by our client to avoid overstocks and stockouts, increase sales dynamics and profitability, and eliminate unforeseen expenses.

From the technological point of view, our team successfully adopted the latest platform development and deployment practices that are in high demand, ensuring the resilience of the solution. Repeatedly praised by our client, the big data analytics platform we helped to build has won an internal award for the most innovative product within our client’s company, further proving our excellent engineering partnership.