Multiregional Home Services Organization
Unifying data across business units for comprehensive analytics and insights.
Overview
THE CHALLENGE
HomeTown Services wanted to centralize its subsidiary business data on a scalable platform to gain organizational insights for performance optimizations and new acquisition growth. Without a way to efficiently unify the data, HomeTown Services had to rely on time-consuming manual processes to combine individual reports for inclusive analytics.
THE SOLUTION
Ollion designed a cloud data warehouse using Snowflake’s Data Cloud hosted on AWS that includes Fivetran for Automation Document Processing (ADP) data ingestion, dbt (data build tool) for data building and development ease, and Power BI for reporting and dashboarding.
THE OUTCOME
The new modern and scalable platform not only allows the organization to unify data from individual software instances, but it empowers a range of users with dynamic analytics tools and processes for onboarding newly acquired subsidiaries.
About the Business
HomeTown Services includes leading residential service brands that offer services and equipment home comfort solutions focused on heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and electric generators. Subsidiaries are located in a variety of states, with the majority operating in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.
The challenge and solution
Understanding the organization’s need for a data repository, Ollion designed a Snowflake data warehouse hosted on AWS. Updated on a Change Data Capture (CDC) basis, the organization can access real-time data so downstream processes and systems are always using current information. Fivetran was also utilized through AWS for ADP ingestion. This tool allows the data warehouse to ingest and centralize data from a variety of sources, including ServiceTitan instances across subsidiaries. With this modern data solution, executives, employees, and the subsidiaries themselves get a view of key operational metrics across locations and business units based on the access they are granted.
The majority of end users will only interact with the solution through the Power BI dashboards that Ollion created. We designed these dashboards with direct input from end users to ensure they can achieve exactly what they need. Data from ServiceTitan is combined with rich filtering capabilities to understand and compare subsidiaries by location, service, job function, date and time, and seasonality. To help developers and data teams maximize their new data accessibility, Ollion deployed dbt. Dbt enables a faster, easier, and more reliable development process where people can work within their own environment and test changes before pushing to production. Tables and scripts can quickly be added to the solution without disruption for streamlined acquisition onboarding.
Planning for growth, the solution enables scalability and satisfies the organization’s requirement for convenient instance additions. We designed the infrastructure to be able to add more locations to the ingestion pipeline, data warehouse, and reporting variables with as little work as possible. Finally, Ollion compiled detailed documentation about the solution’s critical capabilities, how to access and use each tool, and perform maintenance to give the organization ongoing support after the engagement ended.
The company conducts financial risk modeling using the Monte Carlo Method, a statistical sampling technique that approximates solutions to quantitative problems, to simulate sources of uncertainty that affect the value of their various risk portfolios. Running on-premise, these monthly batch jobs would take up to three weeks to run, tying up expensive computing resources and limiting the ability to run other jobs. The company was faced with a major data center expansion and infrastructure upgrades to accommodate the growing batch computing requirements necessary to process all the scheduled jobs as well as what was required to run adequate risk modeling scenarios.
Rather than investing in another data center or co-location contract, the company began exploring running batch jobs using High-Performance Computing (HPC) on the public cloud to meet this growing demand. The company avoided the traditional provision of technology by leveraging the Ollion Risk Modeling solution on AWS and capitalizing on the elasticity of the public cloud, enabling workloads to spin up thousands of cores in hours and days versus weeks and months. The hybrid solution has increased the visibility for the business and provided data to meet the Federal Reserve regulatory requirements and make different business decisions.
The fully managed Ollion Risk Modeling solution provides security logs by Alert Logic, orchestration by Cycle Computing, and scalable infrastructure by AWS. Ollion is also supporting additional workloads for the company with similar solutions that require end-of-month, quarter, and annual reporting for its clients.
The company was also looking for a way to control a multi-account environment and provide access, audit, and management capabilities through a unified security framework. Ollion implemented centralized billing and administration using AWS Landing Zone patterns, SSO anchoring via ADFS, and global service catalog controls via organizations. Ollion enabled an RBAC model that combined ADFS direct access as well as cross-account capabilities and standardized services and configuration to ease service catalog vending machine-style offerings. The company now utilizes Direct Connect with VPC Peering for Network Access control. Additionally, Ollion created an AMI factory utilizing vetted images, root volume encryption to satisfy security audit requirements, and pre-staged essential services.
Business benefits
HomeTown Services’ new data solution is saving them precious time by eliminating manual tasks and increasing productivity with data insight efficiency. Instead of having to track each subsidiary separately via their ServiceTitan instance, the organization has an unobstructed view across the entire business. Now they can utilize operations and performance data with filtering to analyze and impact positive outcomes with optimizations. Different dashboards designed for a variety of end users enable collaborative data sharing while eliminating data silos and providing opportunities for new use case fulfillment.
HVAC subsidiaries in particular are utilizing weather data to predict and forecast supply and demand based on seasonality. Obviously, changes in temperature are a big catalyst for HVAC services. With weather data now available in the context of service demand, equipment supply, and staffing needs, HVAC subsidiaries can adjust operations accordingly to meet predicted demand more precisely. This new capability will most certainly yield cost-efficiency and serve as a roadmap for other subsidiary divisions.
Newly acquired subsidiaries can be onboarded seamlessly with realistic goal setting based on existing performance data and established benchmarks. With a more effective process for acquisitions, HomeTown Services can acquire more subsidiaries at a faster rate for accelerated overall growth. The platform is designed for unending scalability that will continue to grow with the organization and incorporate future data sources as they become available. Now equipped with this data solution, our client can significantly improve a variety of business developments with trusted data insights.
