About Client
The client is one of the world’s largest and oldest multi-channel bookmaking and gaming companies from the United Kingdom; operating in over 25 countries with annual revenue exceeding €3 billion as of 2020.
Background
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Mergers and acquisitions are a regular news headline in the casino industry. There are two main data challenges that come with M&A-
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The need to shift from or to accommodate different data infrastructure tools and platforms- Consolidating all the data across various platforms and databases used by the firm to a single consolidated space like a data warehouse or data lake for a holistic view of the company’s functioning, performance, potential and untapped opportunities.
Challenge
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- The client had recently merged with another major online casino and wanted to build a single consolidated data-warehouse with unified data structures and processes across the organization. And as a part of its long-term strategic plan, the client wanted to move away from Oracle and few other sets of diverse data storage options to MS-SQL Server.
- The data migration process from Oracle to MS-SQL is a mammoth task and needed shell scripting in order to migrate the data from several flat files including csv and excel
Our Solution
An agile development methodology was necessary to swiftly complete all the tasks required for the firm, so that they could continue with their operations.- An expert 24 x 7 BI Operations Support team was formed in addition to the Development team to support the distributed teams from multiple locations; enabling continuous monitoring of the data extraction & loading processes, fixing failures, managing dependencies and escalating wherever needed.
- This also ensured that the core team focused on solutions without getting diverted by the daily operations, data processes, business questions etc.
- The process of transferring to MS-SQL required a tedious process of converting Oracle data structures to MSSQL data structures (tables, views, stored procedures) and changing the ODI ETL modules to load data to MSSQL Server.
- Then a data warehouse was designed that reflected the key business metrics of both the merged entities.
- The operations support team supervised the parallel runs in hidden mode of the new migrated solution and daily comparison of results, this included performance benchmarking.
- The team also phased the transition from the legacy DWH (data warehouse) to migrated DWH and drove the data processes towards meeting the SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
- In cases where the SLA breach was anticipated, BizAcuity would send out relevant and necessary communications to all stakeholders, with hourly updates on the same.
Outcome
- The end-to-end ETL process for both entities used to run for 6 hours each before the merger
The process now is completed in
7 Hours
for both entities combined
