Get Inspired is a well-known e-commerce company in Trondheim, Norway, which has been named the Norwegian online store of the year by an independent professional jury in 2016, 2020, and 2021.
“Where do our best customers live?” and “How well does our delivery partner handle Christmas peaks?” were just a few of the questions Get Inspired had trouble answering.
“We had grown rapidly, and our data was distributed between ERP, CRM, Facebook, Google, and several other systems,” said manager Andreas Nordås of Get Inspired. “A lot of time was spent looking at reports from different systems and using Excel sheets for aggregation. Eventually, it became unsustainable.”
Get Inspired chose to build a data warehouse with Helmes; the companies had cooperated before in building e-Commerce solutions. Helmes has long experience in building data warehouse solutions with Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
Choosing a cloud partner and technology stack takes some effort. It’s difficult to match the offerings of different providers. You need to understand your data volumes now and, after three years, how frequently you query data and do some guesswork. It’s easy to overpay for a solution you will never need.
Helmes did the initial investigation and compared:
- AWS,
- Azure,
- Google Cloud Platform.
We discovered in this circumstance that the best option would be Google Cloud Platform, which provided the best cost/performance ratio for data needs for Get Inspired. One crucial factor was the frequency with which data was queried from the data warehouse. Some platforms are more suitable than others when you need to query data in real-time. However, modern BI tools such as Power BI and Tableau only query a data warehouse a few times a day.
The team conducted the project using Agile Methodology, and data sources were added one by one and merged with existing data. With each new source, the reporting became more advanced. The team started with ERP, then moved on to CRM, Google Analytics, Facebook, and other data sources. Some data is updated daily, and some more often.
In the end, Get Inspired achieved a situation where there was no vendor lock-in; Get Inspired now owns all import scripts and data. If needed, this makes migrating the entire solution to AWS or Azure easy.
Compared to the previous setup, the company saved more than 83% in its running cost for the system.
“Instead of days, I can now use just some hours gathering the necessary insights and have an overall much more enjoyable work experience,” Nordås said.
Having a service partner from abroad
Norwegian companies typically reduce their local cost budget by 50 percent by choosing an Estonian supplier. The partner needs to be a good fit, though.
The top-shelf technical competence here at Helmes, Nordic values, and setting up of small motivated teams would make us a dream partner for many companies.
Image: bloomberg.com
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