Melissa and Doug, Wilton, Connecticut, www.melissaanddoug.com, is a privately held American manufacturer of children’s toys with about 1,000 employees worldwide. Melissa and Doug has experienced steady growth since the 1980’s and was operating the business with a homegrown ERP and Warehouse Management system with ad-hoc reporting capabilities using Tableau. 2020 brought changing business requirements and MnD experienced a difficult time accommodating them due to an inflexible Data Management architecture.

Myers-Holum, Inc (MHI) provided the strategic recommendation to implement an improved Data Management platform using Google Cloud with Looker for their data modernization efforts. We worked with the business to document future state KPI requirements, facilitated a data governance program, and defined their future state BigQuery EDW architecture using Cloud Composer, Cloud Storage, BigQuery SQL.

New requirements came along at the end of the implementation project to report across newly created channel hierarchies, sales hierarchies, and region hierarchies. The newly built Data Management solution allowed for a quick implementation of the new requirements to satisfy business needs to respond to the changing business landscape of 2020.

“The newly built data management solution  allowed for a quick implementation of new requirements that satisfied the business need to respond to the fast-changing landscape in 2020”  Chris Conway, CTO, Melissa and Doug

Aristocrat/VGT, Franklin, Tennessee, www.aristocrat.com, is a leading developer, manufacturer, and distributor of Class II casino games in North America. Aristocrat handles an exorbitant amount of data and had an existing 5-year-old Hadoop Big Data platform that was unable to scale to their 10s of TBs of data volumes. They experienced functional requirement changes, had concerns around stability, high availability, and uptime, and maintained only a single environment with no separation for their dev, test, and prod environments. Furthermore, there were serious capacity concerns that required a separate Vertica-based BI layer which meant increased costs, maintenance, and more data pipelines to manage.

Myers-Holum, Inc (MHI) engaged with Aristocrat to provide expertise on their migration to Google BigQuery. We leveraged a Data Transfer Appliance to move their 10s of TB of data off Hadoop and to Google BigQuery and rebuilt the existing data processing pipelines using Google Cloud Composer and BigQuery SQL capabilities. MHI also completed the data modeling and best practices for Data Warehousing on BigQuery. Finally, we enabled analytics using Tableau.

The results of this initiative were more precise and faster data insights which left Aristocrat positioned and enabled for future data growth.

“We successfully addressed serious capacity concerns that previously required a separate Hadoop and Vertica instances with a single unified GCP Data Management platform which reduced costs, reduced complexity, and increased capacity to onboard new data sources” – Rick Watts, Sr. Architect