Driving growth in e-commerce with a comprehensive data analytics solution

As an all-in-one e-commerce provider, the client is continuously looking for solutions to meet every customer need. Therefore, to satisfy the request of their largest customer, the client began improving the analytics solution and looked for assistance from a tech partner with the right expertise. The main task was to enhance the tool that provides reports on client’s subscription (i.e., revenue, number of new customers) and complement it with more visually informative data.

Our team has designed a data strategy with a clear implementation plan of the reporting solution that uses Power BI. This was achieved by performing an extensive Discovery Phase, during which the team interviewed the client’s stakeholders and examined existing processes. We have used the obtained implementation plan to build a modern data platform based on AWS and establish effective data governance.

Our team has used AWS DMS to retrieve data from the client’s on-premise Oracle database in near-real-time mode. This has allowed our experts to receive CDC data (Change Data Capture) as soon as possible and build upstream tables based on all occurred changes. They have also used the already implemented Dynamics 365 as the second source of data, which is retrieved with the help of the Dynamics 365 REST API.

All data is transferred to AWS S3, where it moves through 3 layers: bronze (raw data ingestion), silver (filtered, cleaned, and transformed data), and gold (business level aggregates). The movement of data between these layers is attained through the use of Apache Spark, an analytics engine for data processing. Data from the business layer is also moved to Snowflake, a data warehouse, where it can be served to Power BI. Our experts can then use their extensive knowledge in Power BI to build informative Business Intelligence reports for the client’s customers.

N-iX team has also helped the client significantly improve their data security by establishing effective data governance. This data governance is separated into two parts, one being based on AWS, and another one - on Snowflake.

By developing the comprehensive data analytics solution, N-iX has helped the client match the need of one of their largest customers and expand their services by making the solution a part of their product offering. The client has also gained several additional benefits:

• Increased their value proposition with a universal reporting solution and helped them attract more customers;
• Boosted information security by establishing effective data governance of the developed data platform;
• Enhanced business decision-making capabilities by allowing to use the solution internally to gain insights about client performance.