The 15th annual Ventana Research Digital Leadership Awards recognize organizations and individuals that utilize technology to advance business and IT. The Awards showcase professional leadership and their use of business applications or technology that led to improved organizational efficiency, productivity and performance. These leaders and pioneers have contributed to their organization’s success and championed improvements across people, processes, information and technology.
Organizations of all sizes and industries are deluged by an unceasing torrent of data coming from a multitude of sources in many formats, stored in disparate systems. This presents a challenge to capture increasingly detailed data, keep more history than ever and store mounting volumes of data. Applying data science and using machine learning and predictive analytics helps organizations derive the true value from data, but these techniques generate even more information.
Ventana Research selected Oldcastle Infrastructure for the 15th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Data as a model for investment in new data and analytics technology that had a profound impact on overall business strategy. The transition enabled the organization to overcome entrenched organizational and cultural inefficiencies to deliver time and cost savings as well as improved margins and sales.
Oldcastle Infrastructure, a CRH company, is an industry leader in engineered building solutions, offering more than 16,000 pipe, precast, stormwater, enclosure and building accessory products. The company has grown through acquisitions, acquiring over 85 organizations in its 40-plus years. Oldcastle historically took an additive approach to acquisitions, creating inconsistent ways of doing business and handling major decisions. There were more than 30 similar but not consistent procedures, holding the company back by limiting scalability and sustainability.
As the company grew, it took larger teams and more money to navigate changes, understand the impact of these changes and determine the right responses. There was a desire to regentrify the company by leveraging its scale. Leadership wanted to realize strategic benefits from its data, which required breaking down silos, bringing data together and incorporating external data. To accomplish this migration, Oldcastle needed a data integration tool that was user-friendly and low maintenance – something that did not require an increase in headcount or specialized data engineering resources. Importantly, Oldcastle needed a solution that was plug-and-play for integrating two enterprise resource planning systems, including NetSuite.
Oldcastle selected data integration partner Fivetran to organize its data and use it more effectively to generate comprehensive business insights. Oldcastle uses a data stack with Tableau as its business intelligence platform, Snowflake for data warehousing and Fivetran as its data pipeline tool.
The Fivetran deployment reduced operational costs by retiring legacy processes, increasing worker productivity and improving visibility into company operations via unified data in one, central environment. Using Fivetran enabled Oldcastle to avoid resource, software and hardware costs for its on-premises BI system and find a low-maintenance software that eliminated workflow bottlenecks such as computing power constraints and competition between loading and consuming data.
Oldcastle and Nick Heigerick were selected for the 15th Annual Digital Leadership Award in Data for the transformation into a data-driven organization. Oldcastle has moved beyond using data for diagnostic reasons and has implemented data science for accurate predictions into future behaviors. Oldcastle gained access to new benefits, including optimization of data flows using machine-learning algorithms and prebuilt data sync monitoring tools. Every team across the organization benefits from the integration of Fivetran.
Data is a key element of any digital transformation initiative, delivering efficiencies and competitive differentiation through innovation. Fivetran addresses the challenges of rapidly loading, integrating and transforming data across an enterprise. Organizations with distributed data and multiple analytics initiatives will appreciate Fivetran’s capability to deliver reliable data pipelines and accelerate time to insight.
Organizations looking to maximize the value of business and technology investments across its people and processes should consider how data can optimize its digital potential. If you have not examined how Fivetran can help your organization, it is well worth your time. Congratulations, Nick Heigerick at Oldcastle Infrastructure, for your leadership.
Ventana Research offers expertise and research-based guidance on big data and information management to help you expand competencies that will enhance the value of data. Our insights on smarter storage, integration, virtualization, governance and preparation will enable you to embrace new methods for using information effectively. Change is required to enable business resilience and data readiness to maintain competitiveness and achieve the outcomes your organization deserves.