The existing Premier Foods analytics BI tool relied to a great extent on spreadsheet-based reporting and outdated data warehousing. This caused several issues stemming from a lack of external data integration capabilities and built-in data visualization. A key challenge was the need for manual, offline reporting caused by a lack of access to updated master data. These factors impacted business directly by limiting and slowing BI. Additionally, compliance with the recent Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) legislation in the UK meant bringing together data sets that weren’t supported by its current system.
Data Digest: From Prep to Science with Pyramid Analytics
Pyramid Analytics provides a pioneering decision intelligence platform. According to Deepa Sankar, Vice President of Product Marketing at Pyramid Analytics, “Pyramid Analytics uniquely combines data prep, business analytics, and data science all within one platform with a super-fast direct query engine and an AI-guided governed self-service experience to speed up insights for non-technical people.” For Premier Foods, this was key to fulfilling its requirements. Additionally, with its main source of transaction data—like sales records—coming in from SAP, the new system also needed to connect with SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW). Daniel Flynn, Analytics Manager at Premier Foods, said, “Other solutions in the market required us to extract data and effectively copy it. That is not a solution for us. That’s a workaround. Being able to connect into SAP was a huge win for us, and to be able to pull that data through, with prompts on our live connection, was great.”
Premier Foods uses Amazon RedShift for reporting on data other than transactions, such as core product information, from multiple sources like SAP, Hamilton Grant, and manual files. Amazon RedShift unloads that data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for future reference and analytics. Amazon S3 is also used to store data written back from Pyramid models. AWS CodeCommit manages the code in Matillion, the Extract Transform Load (ETL) tool that the solution runs. Pyramid Analytics then enables Premier Foods to report on the data from both SAP BW and Amazon RedShift, while Amazon CloudWatch provides alerts for ETL and Pyramid instances from a monitoring perspective.
For the implementation, the Pyramid team worked closely with Flynn’s team during the Proof of Concept (POC) stage to create a robust connection between different tools to any data source that Premier Foods needed. Further, their recommendations on server sizing, and production and development environment, helped Premier Foods to successfully structure the capacity required for the new solution.
