Marketing Execution Firm

The Overview

This marketing execution firm helps Fortune 500 companies deliver a more consistent brand experience. In the throes of an urgent data management crisis, they reached out to 2nd Watch for help creating a modern analytics platform. We quickly assembled a team and expedited a reporting and management dashboard solution for the client’s global marketing operations, achieving a finished result in just six weeks.

The Challenge

Several failed attempts to build out an on-premise analytics platform had caused major setbacks for the client, including poor reporting performance, errors while processing data, and the inability to efficiently scale reporting infrastructure as new needs emerged. This had adversely affected the company’s work in markets worldwide, leaving them with manual processes and no single source of determining truth.

In addition, the client was having trouble ensuring that analytics data was accurate and up to date. Their former reporting solution, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), didn’t provide the desired flexibility and required repetitious manual input.
This lack of consistent, effective reporting had frustrated the efforts of staff, prompting leadership to seek a fast solution.

Unique Challenges:

• Extremely short project timeline
• Creation of a dedicated team to gather requirements and define project scope
• Simultaneous deployment of another team to work through the data models; architect an extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution; and design dashboards

The Solution

2nd Watch started by working with the client to identify a typical use case, then took this as a model to build the new analytics platform. Together, we decided to build the analytics solution with a special focus on reporting the market interest of the client’s cataloged products.

Another component of our work was using the Microsoft Azure platform to integrate various types of system data into a centralized location. Using this data repository, we were able to model that data into dashboards and executive reports, providing an enterprise-wide view of the market demand for their products.

Key Success Metrics:

• Offered a high degree of insight about market interest
• Replaced their existing SSIS package, helping company stakeholders arrive at a single version of truth and streamline processes
• Architected and deployed in under 6 weeks

The Outcome

The new analytics system achieved all the client’s goals, alleviating manual processes, improving the efficiency and accuracy of their reporting, and enabling their business to move toward advanced analytics capabilities with total confidence. This improved level of insight has helped company management make decisions based on a more holistic view of market interest in their products.