Marketing Data Pipelines and Business Intelligence - Daz Productions

Daz Productions, Inc. (Daz) is a 3D-content and software company specializing in providing rigged 3D human models, associated accessory content, and software to the hobbyist as well as the prosumer market.

Summary of Results

• By having data consolidated into one location, the ability to leverage data across data sources to see a broader picture has become possible.

• Having data available in Looker gives the ability for a much broader range of people to access as well as build data insights.

• Pulling of reports is now an on-demand opportunity, as opposed to waiting for manually pulled reports that were very labor intensive to merge together from the various sources.

• Data is up to date with robust data pipelines and data warehouse, thanks to data pipelines using Matillion and Stitch.

• The business now has the data it needs to make timely and actionable decisions.

• Self-service analytics. No more bottlenecks.

The Challenge

Daz is a wildly popular 3D rendering platform and marketplace, and uses a number of tools to interact with its customers. Daz hosts a customer facing point-of-sale system in Magento. They also utilize Zendesk for customer ticket tracking, and Oracle Bronto to manage email campaigns. 

Daz’s challenge was consolidating their various data to better understand their customers. While spreadsheets and ad hoc queries “got the job done”, there were a few issues with this approach. First, the data sources were messy, scattered and not well suited to analytics without substantial preprocessing. Second, there were a lot of manual processes for the business to analyze data, making it difficult to make timely decisions. Third, the sole analyst at Daz spent most of his time fielding a backlog of various reporting requests, which didn’t leave an opportunity to work on the underlying data infrastructure improvements. Finally, Daz’s longer term goal is using machine learning to improve the user experience on its marketplace. To achieve these goals, Daz needed a scalable and manageable solution to their data challenges.

The Solution

In order to build a solid foundation for analytics and machine learning, Daz needed two new components - a data pipeline and a data warehouse. For business intelligence and reporting, Daz had already purchased Looker, which it used for a handful of reports.

Daz approached Ternary Data to architect a new data pipeline, warehouse and reporting platform. After careful consideration, the following technologies were chosen.

• Data pipelines - Daz needed a cost-effective and low code/no code solution for its data pipelines. Matillion and Stitch were chosen. Matillion has low-code connectors for Magento and Zendesk and transformation capabilities, at a cost of a few dollars a day. Stitch’s no-code solution works very easily with Oracle Bronto Marketing Platform. From the start, Matillion and Stitch worked very well, and continue to be in operation with little to no additional maintenance.

• Data Warehouse - Because Daz was already using Google Cloud for another initiative, it made perfect sense to use Google BigQuery. BigQuery’s pay-as-you-go model, infinite scalability and no maintenance made it a no-brainer choice for Daz’s data warehouse.

• Business Intelligence and reporting - Daz already purchased Looker prior to the new data platform. Looker’s robust data modeling layer (LookML) and ease of use gives Daz’s organization the ability to do self-service analytics and reporting.

The Process

Ternary Data operates in a coaching and enablement role, as this puts the customer in the driver’s seat, and increases the chance of success of the project. Ternary taught Daz’s team how to create data pipelines, ingest data into BigQuery, and model the data in Looker for reports. The time to production took 6 weeks. Daz now has a solid data platform for both reporting and machine learning, as well as the internal capabilities to expand this platform on their own.

Ternary Data also provided workshops on reporting and Looker best practices to Daz’s broader organization. This gave Daz the confidence to fully engage with the new data platform and the self-service analytics of Looker.

The value of Daz’s data platform is evident. Before the data platform, if someone in the business didn’t get a report, it was painful but tolerated. Now that the bottlenecks are removed from accessing data, Daz’s appetite for data has exploded, and there’s no tolerance for not being able to get answers as questions are asked. Daz is getting real value from its data.

About Ternary Data

Ternary Data is a specialty data architecture and consulting firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Ternary Data advises and coaches companies on discovering the value in their data through cloud services and best practices.

Ternary Data is partnered with Google Cloud and many more best in class data technology companies.