Healthy Options increases reporting accuracy and cuts down report creation time

Background

Healthy Options is the first and largest all-natural and organic products retailer in the Philippines since 1995, specializing in premium and natural food and health products. They have over 30 stores nationwide, as well as an online shop.

Challenge

Healthy Options recognizes the importance of data to make informed decisions. They have fully digital business processes, running on business applications such as Microsoft NAV, Infor, and Shopify. They have been using Tableau to visualize their data since 2017. However, the company’s fast growth has put a strain on their data collection, processing, and consumption. Their multiple sources of data require different ways of extraction and transformation. Their data warehouse also contained non-optimized and inconsistent tables. These challenges resulted in slow report generation as well as low data integrity. On top of it all, there is little documentation of the data landscape, making it vulnerable to problems during incident management and migration.

Solution

Stratpoint Technologies designed and built Healthy Options’ data infrastructure powered on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The setup was meant to capture and transform data from multiple sources, ensure data integrity and governance, connect easily with third-party reporting platforms, and be ready to scale as Healthy Options grows.

To get things started, Stratpoint conducted a Cloud Bedrock workshop with Healthy Options. At this stage, the teams will determine the cloud needs of the data project as well as agree on the deployment strategy for the infrastructure.

In the Data Modeling Session, Stratpoint guided Healthy Options to determine the organization of contextual data in the data warehouse. This is to prepare the system to cater to the company’s needs in analytics.

In the incumbent system, data is stored in relational databases (SQL server) and visualized in Tableau. In the new setup:

• Data from relational databases will be ingested using AWS Glue JDBC connection, while data from API sources will be ingested using AWS Lambda. These will be placed into designated staging Amazon S3 buckets. 
• AWS Lake Formation will be used to enforce data governance and security in the data lake. 
• Amazon Glue will crawl, and transform the data in accordance with the business rules. This will also create a central catalog of the data for reference. 
• The data catalog can be used in querying data in S3 buckets using Amazon Athena. 
• Data that went through the transformation jobs will be located in a separate S3 bucket and will be loaded into the Snowflake data warehouse.

The data warehouse will contain information crucial to the business of Healthy Options. To mitigate threats, security measures were built into the design of the platform. Stratpoint created and configured security policies in both S3 and Snowflake to filter sensitive information. Analysts and data scientists will no longer connect directly to the source to extract data for their own analysis and reports. They can only query information that they need for their respective tasks.

As part of its best practices when implementing data projects, Stratpoint generated the proper documentation for the new Healthy Options data warehouse. 

After going live, Healthy Options is able to realize the following benefits:

• Increased productivity. The time needed to generate reports will be improved. This is thanks to a system that automatically handles the extraction and transformation of data from various sources.
• Increased data security. Stratpoint, together with Healthy Options, have set policies to limit the exposure of data. Users are only able to see data that they need and is necessary for their work. 
• Increased data integrity and visibility. Through modeling and transformation, the company derives information from a single source of truth. 

Today, the Healthy Options Management Team is able to make more timely and accurately informed decisions, necessary capabilities for a company that aims to expand their reach through online and physical stores in the midst of global health crisis-related challenges as well as competition.

Technologies used:

• AWS Services: S3 Bucket, Lambda, Glue, Athena, Lake Formation
• Snowflake