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    BI Modernization: Transition to Real-Time Analytics on the Cloud

    • Practice
    Data Platform Data Visualization Data Management
    • Team

    1 Architect
    1 Tech Lead
    1 Developer

    • Technical environment
    Real-time BI
    No operational impact
    Unified data
    Group-wide visibility
    Cloud foundation
    Ready to scale
    CHALLENGES

    Founded in 2001, this pure player in contract logistics operates on a global scale across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. The Group designs and delivers end-to-end logistics solutions—including warehousing, value-added services (engineering, IT, co-packing), and transport organization—to meet the specific needs of its international clients.

    The Group relied on legacy business intelligence systems that were no longer able to support current operational and strategic requirements:

    • Overloaded BI systems: Analytical workloads were impacting operational environments, affecting system performance and data availability.
    • Data fragmentation: Insights depended on fragmented data originating from 180 distinct operational databases, making real-time access complex and inefficient.
    • Technology limitations: The existing architecture was misaligned with the Group’s Cloud and BI as a Service (BIaaS) ambitions, limiting scalability and agility.
    • Strategic objective: Centralize all Group data to accelerate operational and business decision-making, while establishing a sustainable and scalable data platform.
    SOLUTION
    To address these challenges, a cloud-centric and modern analytics transformation was implemented.
    • Technology audit and assessment: Evaluation of existing technologies (Oracle, Db2, SQL Server, BusinessObjects) to define an appropriate migration strategy.
    • Benchmarking phase: Selection of a real-time replication solution from four shortlisted tools to ensure performance and reliability.
    • Migration to Snowflake: Consolidation of heterogeneous data sources into a unified cloud data warehouse on Snowflake, enabling real-time analytics and BI reporting.
    • BI environment reconnection: SAP BusinessObjects applications were reconnected to the Snowflake platform with no service disruption, ensuring full business continuity.
    BENEFITS
    The transformation delivered significant operational and strategic value:
    • A single analytics platform for the entire Group and its subsidiaries, eliminating data silos and enabling unified data governance.
    • 100% of existing BI functionalities reviewed and migrated, ensuring functional continuity while modernizing the architecture.
    • A consolidated vision and single data roadmap, aligning IT and business teams around a shared strategic trajectory.
    • Internalized capability to accelerate future real-time deployments: the platform now serves as a foundation to support subsidiaries in replicating their real-time data into the central warehouse.

     

    A Strategic Project

    For a global logistics player, the ability to leverage high-frequency, near real-time data is a critical competitive advantage:
    • Improved operational steering: real-time data enhances monitoring of logistics performance (flows, inventory, lead times, costs).
    • Reduced dependency on critical transactional systems, strengthening IT resilience.
    • Faster business decision-making, enabled by a single, reliable data reference.
    • A technology foundation for advanced use cases, including predictive analytics, operational optimization, and automation.