Modernizing Distribution Analytics with Snowflake

For This Food Distributor, Data Modernization Is On The Menu

With nearly 28,000 employees and over 70 locations, this leading food service distributor helps 300,000 restaurants and food service operators succeed. They provide their customers with a broad and innovative food offering and a comprehensive suite of e-commerce, technology, and business solutions.

With such a vast network to serve, this company sought to develop a cloud-first strategy that would modernize and standardize their data platform. Their goals were to:

• Introduce a best-in-class architecture to enable the capabilities, performance, security, and scale that modern business requires
• Build user confidence in their data through governance and a consistent source of truth for reporting and analytics 
• Create an executable plan to sunset legacy reports and data integration flows, in order to enable the migration from Exadata and enterprise rollout to the modern BI platform

But first, they needed a plan. And a platform.

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Gathering Ingredients For Grade-A Transformation

Platform modernization, like cooking, is a balance of art and science. Launch deployed an expert team from our Management Consulting Studio to assess the maturity level of our client’s team, processes, and tools across multiple data and analytics capabilities. The Studio also evaluated the company's business needs, focusing heavily on the people who work with the data system. In this process, we:

• Interviewed over 200 stakeholders across 10+ business units to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and pain points of the Data & Analytics organizational function
• Completed an as-is maturity assessment, conducted root-cause analysis on pain points, and designed the desired future state of the client’s Data & Analytics function​
• Prioritized recommendations and developed a workable roadmap to address the people, process, and technology changes needed for our client to realize their vision
• Recommended the Snowflake Data Cloud as a technology solution for Data & Analytics goals
• Built a business case to present to the C-Suite and Board of Directors to obtain buy-in on the path forward

That last piece is so important. We know exactly how frustrating it is to identify and need and come up with a plan, only to have it denied because leadership doesn't see the business case. That's why this kind of depth in an assessment, plus finding the right technology to solve the problem without overengineering the solution, is crucial.

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Serving Up The Best Results – No Substitutions

Our client needed a Navigator to guide them toward their vision, and that’s what they got. They received detailed recommendations and an exhaustive map to get them to their goal: a modernized BI platform and a new organizational analytics model, implemented across five different workstreams.

To show them what was possible, Launch delivered a Proof of Technology that streamlined data integration processes within a modern data warehouse. Due to the scale of the data this company uses - national distribution of many perishable goods takes a lot of it - we recommended Snowflake as the data platform that would best suit their business needs. As concepted, the Snowflake platform built for this client:

• Significantly reduces load and rendering times for end users
• Enables a consistent end-user experience to accelerate user adoption of the platform and enable self-service
• Enhances operational support processes of the platform to enable continued improvement and responsiveness and meet evolving needs
• Provides operational cost savings through toolset rationalization and improved development efficiencies

Now that’s a five-star delivery.