Real Success Stories
The Group’s consultants have become accustomed to being present, while not visible.
Largest Data & Analytics Programme
– the ultimate delivery achievement
Quality data remains a critical asset to every business across the globe. In 2009, PBT Group built its first integrated data warehouse solution for a well known South African mobile company. This initiative evolved into a journey of uncharted territory through 20 countries across Africa and the Middle East. The objective was to implement a standardised Business Intelligence solution across all operations. For 8-years, PBT Group ventured into unique environments, with great diversity in language and culture, even war-torn countries. The entire life cycle of this meta data driven solution, based on an adaptive data model, was mainly performed in a remote manner.
More than 160 million subscribers
24/7 Centralised remote support
This comprehensive Data and Analytics platform eventually processed enormous data volumes of more than 160 million subscribers daily, with PBT Group providing 24/7 centralised, remote support. As organisations today are reeling to adjust to the new normal, the Group’s consultants have become accustomed to being present, while not visible – a model the Group has successfully tried and tested over a number of years.
Customisable remote service in Support of cost optimisations
The client is a £1.5 billion revenue organisation and leading manufacturer of convenience foods and supplies a wide range of chilled, frozen and ambient foods to customers in the United Kingdom.
PBT Group provided Data Engineering, Data Modelling, Analysis and Agile Management skills for a project carried out in 2019, to consolidate data, resulting from the company’s growth through acquisitions. The data was sourced from various siloed ERP, manufacturing, supplier and product management systems to build a consolidated corporate data mart. The total team working on the project ranged from 18-30 people during the various phases of the project. This project was a successful use case in the efficiency and cost effectiveness of remote work, where the offsite PBT Group staff worked with the client’s onsite business and subject matter experts at their various manufacturing and IT locations in the UK. PBT Group’s consultants worked collaboratively with the client from the United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and South Africa.
The use of video conferencing, ability to connect to remote servers in UK data centres and Azure cloud, complemented by quality skills, minimal time difference, as well as effective English communication, proved the feasibility of remote working. This initiative provided a solid foundation for the client to be prepared for the new ways of working required during and after the recent global pandemic crisis.
This project was a successful case in the efficiency and cost effectiveness of remote work.
A Tale Of Many Clouds
PBT Group’s ability to adapt to different technologies and enable significant business benefit can be demonstrated through the successful Use Cases below.
Azure Data Warehouse Modernisation
A proposal and design were presented to the client to start adopting a cloud-based architecture of a full modern data analytics platform on Azure. Cloud provisioning allowed the project to start virtually immediately. The client’s most urgent needs could be met in two short agile phases and value was derived in a matter of weeks. The long-term architecture and design principles also laid the foundation while growing the analytics platform into maturity.
Azure provisioned – Data Factory, Data Warehouse, MSSQL services, SSIS, Python, Blobstore.
GCP Metadata driven ETL
The client’s Lost Sales Calculation took between 30 minutes to 3 hours per department, for 45 departments. This calculation now runs in less than 10 minutes for the entire organisation. Analysts can maintain the ETL by simply editing SQL that they are familiar with, while the solution can be parameterised in a flexible way to perform ad hoc runs. This implies that planners can add new prices and redo their planning run at the push of a button.
Google Cloud Data Store (to store the ETL task definitions and dependencies), Google Cloud Bigquery (to do the Big Data processing), Google App Engine, Google Cloud Functions. Scheduled either via App Engine cron, or Composer (Apache Airflow). Engine developed in Python 3.
AWS DataIKU Workflow Optimisation
In order to do stock optimisation simulation, this client’s data needed to be transformed and validated in a series of complex steps. Using the DataIKU API, these repetitive steps could be automatically generated, which reduced the validation and selection development time by an order of magnitude, while also automatically taking care of naming standards and best practices across all validation processes.
AWS, PostgreSQL, DataIKU, Python
The Group’s Key Differentiators can be Summarised as Follows:
PBT Group has been a Data Specialist organisation for more than 20-years.
PBT Group provides custom made services and solutions to best meet its clients’ business needs.
Data Engineering is a key enabler to Data Science and remains one of the Group’s core competencies.
Being technology agnostic, PBT Group is best positioned to optimise clients’ data platforms without allowing product or technology to limit their options.
PBT Group has more than 5,300,000 hours of data and information management experience.
The Group has implemented projects and provided services in 27 countries.
The PBT Group data expertise spans across many industries.
The Group’s most important assets are its more than 640 experienced consultants
PBT Group provides flexible service and cost models for the new normal of work.