Triumph|Professional services

Summary

Objective

With different people and departments each using their own methods and solutions for understanding data, Triumph needed to consolidate and modernise. Working with Coeo, it brought in a modern, cloud-based solution that would allow its people to use data faster and more accurately.

Solution

• Microsoft Power BI
• Microsoft Azure
• Velox for Analytics Accelerator

Results

• Data silos consolidated to create a single source of truth
• Triumph’s team has the skills and knowledge to manage their own data solution
• The solution is being rolled out to other departments
• A new, growing data culture
• Improved visibility and access to data
• Legacy solutions can be turned off, saving time and money

With more than 100 years of experience, Triumph is one of the world’s most well-known and loved motorcycle brands. As well as motorcycles, it sells a wide range of branded accessories and clothing, tapping into the company’s appeal among fans.

Since 1983, Triumph has been part of Bloor Holdings and has factories in the UK, Thailand and Brazil.

Learning & understanding

Understanding the problems

From the beginning, our relationship with Triumph Motorcycles was more than a one-way street. Triumph was looking for a partner who could take its existing data resources and bring them together into one consolidated solution. At
the same time, it wanted to gain the knowledge and experience to take on the everyday management of the future solution following the completion of the project.

As Matt Stokes, our Principal Project Manager explains, “Triumph wanted an analytics platform to enable its e-commerce team to self-serve their own data, rather than relying on other teams. This would allow them to be custodians of their own information and make business-critical decisions as quickly as possible.

Similar to other large companies, Triumph had data sources that were disparate and contained multiple versions of the truth. This led to unconnected business intelligence systems like Excel and other point solutions being used for pivotal business decision-making.

“We performed a review of our data repositories, and what we found was that one department was already using a self-contained data warehouse solution, but only in their area,” says Lee Pears, Triumph’s Head of Data Insight.

“We visited the various business areas and found people using Power BI on an individual basis, as well as other tools, all of which were outside the influence of our core IT team.”

To start getting value from their data, Triumph needed to consolidate all these data solutions, in order to create a single version of the truth. They preferred a cloud-first approach, to avoid the limitations of traditional on-premise deployments. The key benefits of the cloud include the ability to scale environments on[1]demand and to perform rapid prototyping for proofs-of[1]concept without the capital expenditure associated with purchasing new infrastructure.

As well as the technical challenges, Triumph would need to overcome resistance to change from those who had already invested time in legacy systems. And for Lee and his team, it also meant demonstrating to Triumph’s board the value of any proposed solutions.

Implementation

Working together to find solutions

Triumph had already set up a steering group, so it had a good idea of what it wanted to get out of this project. The relationship with Coeo really began in earnest when talking Triumph through its options and exploring the benefits of building a data lake and data warehouse from a greenfield perspective.

As part of this process, Coeo held an ‘envision’ workshop at Triumph’s offices. Envision seeks to capture business requirements during the discovery phase, to ensure that the technical solution delivers business value. This helps demonstrate the value of the proposed solution and makes sure all stakeholders are involved in the process and invested in the successful outcome of the solution.

Triumph opted for Power BI to visualise its reports and an Azure solution to support its data landscape. To reduce time, cost and complexity, we used our Velox for Analytics Accelerator. This provides metadata-driven data ingestion, which freed our project team to focus on testing and modelling rather than time-consuming manual data ingestion processing. The project initiated a pilot for the e-commerce team, to help them better understand their department performance and metrics, with the plan to extend this capability to the rest of the business.

As well as bringing over legacy data and reports in the new data lake and warehouse, Coeo was asked to work alongside Triumph’s team, to upskill them and enable self-service. By the time the initial project was nearing completion, Triumph’s team were confident in using the new solution, and were able to dive in and begin resolving issues themselves.

If Triumph did need the Coeo team, we were always there, particularly Matt, who remained the main point of contact throughout the project. For Triumph, that made the whole process more personal and fluid, as Lee explains:

“The fact we’ve had a consistent relationship with Matt has helped immensely and has meant we’ve been able to progress things quicker, because of the intrinsic knowledge we’ve gained from each other – in terms of what the project is trying to do and what we’re trying to achieve.”