Eposability launched over a decade ago, providing traditional IT support & consultancy services to the hospitality sector.
Today they challenge the perception of technology as merely a tool, as they patiently believe that correctly implemented technology can deliver undeniable value. They elevate leading hospitality technology to sit alongside expert insight as essential growth drivers; the former producing the latter to illuminate exactly what clients need to do to catapult their expansion.
The Challenge
When Eposability first engaged with Altis, they had over 200 clients, serving in excess of 36000 people per day, in the process amassing a vast amount of data relating to orders, accounts, menus, staff and payments. Robbie Francis, Managing Director of Eposability, knew his clients could gain critical understanding of their business, if they could leverage this data.
To that end, Eposability developed Power BI dashboards and interactive reports as an add-on service for their clients. These dashboards augmented data from multiple sources, to help guide the clients in making informed decisions on how best to improve profitability and efficiency.
While the Power BI dashboards Eposability developed served the customer’s needs, the solution was effectively fully manual and had a number of limitations.
Eposability required a fully automated solution that would refresh large data sets for hundreds of clients during an overnight period of less than six hours, thereby freeing up their team to do other more valuable work. Robbie realised that he would need some help from a third party to deliver his vision. Robbie was also adamant that his team be able to own and manage the final solution without the need to call on third-party support.
The Solution
Eposability engaged Altis Consulting, a vendor independent Data & Analytics specialist, as a partner to:
- Help select appropriate solution technology. Snowflake was selected as the cloud data warehouse technology and Matillion was chosen as the ETL toolset. Snowflake and Matillion in combination offer a unique, pay as you go Platform as a Service (PaaS)/ Software as a Service (SaaS) scalable cloud-based architecture. Power BI was retained as the data visualisation
toolset of choice. - Design and deliver a Snowflake data warehouse with data ingested and transformed via Matillion.
- Provide training in Data & Analytics principles, dimensional
modelling, and data visualisation principles.
The Benefits
Eposability now has a robust, metadata driven solution that has been rolled out to many of their existing clients. The toolsets selected have proven to be a good fit for Eposability’s requirements and the pay as you go running costs allow them to scale with the growth in their client base.
Onboarding a new client takes only a few minutes and the client is then able to access their dashboards the very next day. The initial data load for a new client may be several million rows and can be loaded automatically as part of the next run after onboarding, or it can be kicked off manually if required. Existing client data is loaded incrementally every day and takes just a few minutes. The cloud infrastructure can be scaled to reduce load time as necessary.
Eposability have created new roles that have given staff opportunities to develop their skills, and they are now able to build upon the solution and offer tailored dashboard development and consulting services to their clients.
The Results
- A single client dashboard with row level security so each client sees their data only.
- Data Warehouse refresh and extraction into Power BI cut from >30 minutes per client to <3 minutes in total.
- Business logic embedded in ETL (back end Data Warehouse refresh) so that a single version of the truth is served to Power BI.
- All Infrastructure hosted in the cloud.
- Ability to scale the solution on demand.
- Matillion supports incremental loads, rollback processes, error management, etc.
The Future
Eposability are continually making incremental enhancements to the solution as well as embarking on larger projects, such as ingesting additional data sources from other 3rd parties and augmenting this data in order to enrich existing reports.
“The solution as a whole brings real benefit to our client base, and is a real differentiator for our business in such a busy market place. It’s incredible that Big Data is now so accessible to even the smallest of businesses, and we see that businesses leveraging this for decision making are growing a lot faster than those not. With the groundwork complete, the real challenge is to continue to discover the value hidden within the data.”
– Robbie Francis, Managing Director
“It is far beyond what I expected, it is so easy to build dashboards from the new data warehouse and using Power BI, coupled with the data visualisation training we received, has made understanding the data so much easier than trawling through Excel spreadsheets.”
– Nathan Moorhouse, Head of Tech Success
