Lapping the Competition with the Snowflake Data Cloud

Take a Look Under the Hood

Our client, one of the largest automotive retailers in the United States, had one goal: providing customers across the country with an honest and simpler buying and service experience. To do that, they needed to have an honest and simpler experience for their employees, too. Faced with the classic concerns of a modern Fastest Growing F500 company — data access, scalability, and security — our client sought a guide to help ensure they’re ready for the road ahead.

In 1946, their founding year, our client sold 14 cars.

In 2021, 75 years later, that number was 536,233.

The Navigator Rides Shotgun

When you think about navigating scalable and secure reporting solutions, you think of Launch Consulting. Our client had worked with Launch data experts since 2018 and had confidence in both our industry expertise and our team’s culture fit with theirs. The goal? To not only architect the project, but also make our client the project owner, so that the internal team is self-sufficient to run the project moving forward.

At the beginning of this project, the retailer’s data was largely stored on-prem, and they experienced a lot of scaling challenges. When you want to grow, your data should enable you, not get in your way! So, they asked Launch to replicate their legacy dataset from their on-prem environment to Snowflake, their cloud platform, where it could be hosted in scalable, secure fashion.

Dealing in Data

As a car dealership company, our client had a lot of personal and business data that their team needed to store, find, use, and protect easily and accurately. From sales and service data to third-party vendor information to legacy data from years past, going through multiple databases and waiting for systems to load repeatedly over the course of a single sale or conversation was frustrating and inefficient for their people. And when your whole business is about getting people moving, that just wasn’t going to work.

Over the course of just three months, we created the entire framework and infrastructure for a data solution of their very own Analytical Platform. We achieved that massive undertaking with a team comprised of senior Launch resources and a developing client team, who ramped up spectacularly to a brand-new system and will be the project owners going forward.

All Dealership – No Limits

With the Analytical Platform, those frustrated users are no longer required to go to individual datasets for each piece of the puzzle when working with customers, regulators, or vendors.

Benefits include:

• A central cloud with access to the full dataset—one-stop shop
• Every piece of data they need in one view, without a bunch of open apps on their desktop
• No more access constraints or worry about lag/crashes related to concurrency
• No more creating new tools or asking for access over and over
• Data secured and governed by Launch

All this ultimately added up to quicker turnaround times for our client’s team, better informed answers to customer questions, and higher satisfaction for users and clientele. Through training and deployment, users felt roadblocks had been removed and that there were fewer hoops to jump through. They told us it made their job easier. After all, finding the data and assembling it is hard! This platform will make it significantly less work for everyone.

A Tech Partnership to be Celebrated

Launch worked hand in hand with Snowflake, a global cloud computing–based data cloud company. Snowflake is uniquely designed to connect businesses globally, across any type or scale of data and many different workloads and unlock seamless data collaboration.

By introducing Snowflake, Launch was able to build a central analytical platform so that all users at our client could access the same data from one source. Launch showcased Snowflake's capabilities by first centralizing credit data, but the automotive retailer expanded this to other areas including finance and marketing.

Full Throttle for the Road Ahead

This is just the beginning for our client’s data-rich future.

As a result of this project, Launch was asked to stay on as a partner and integrate other datasets, like marketing data (which is hosted in Azure) and information from their enterprise data warehouse. Over the course of 2022 and with a growing team, the Analytical Platform will ultimately pull virtually the entire client environment from various sources, becoming a central point of reporting. Their whole company will be in the cloud, from finance to HR to the legacy data warehouse.

The automotive retailer is growing tremendously because of their focus on service and safety. With the Analytical Platform and Launch, their data can keep up for the long haul.

Launch is a proud Select Partner of Snowflake. Snowflake Consulting Partners provide customized, industry-focused solutions to help you take your business to the next level. Harness the full power of the Snowflake Data Cloud by working with trusted experts to mitigate risk, align with your objectives, and drive increased business value.

Data maturity is the key to good organizational decisions, growth trajectory, and AI readiness. Is your data doing everything it can for your organization?Take the Data Maturity Self-Assessment to find any gaps - so you're ready for your next bold move.

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