Case studies / From 20 Data Silos to One Central Data Lake
From 20 Data Silos to One Central Data Lake
Customer
Vodafone Germany
Industry
Telecoms
Company size
Enterprise
Region
EMEA
Destinations
Amazon Web Services
Looker
Google BigQuery
Amazon S3
Vodafone seamlessly automates the connection of all marketing tools of 20 data sources from their technology stack to the data lake via API interface. The platform ensures 24/7 maintenance-free connection to all services.
Background
With revenues of over 45 billion euros, Vodafone is an undisputed market leader in Europe as one of the world's largest telecommunications providers. In addition to fixed-line and mobile services, Vodafone offers a TV service, as well as IoT, cloud & hosting, and security solutions for business customers.
Key results achieved by Vodafone Germany
Central Data Hub for Unified Data Foundation
Vodafone now has a central data lake in the cloud (AWS) for its marketing campaigns, while internally maintaining high data quality. The data foundation ensures that all stakeholders receive consistent information, and is made accessible to more teams than before in a decentralized technology landscape.
Automated Data Transfers for Stable and Reliable Data Availability
Thanks to Adverity, Vodafone seamlessly automates the connection of all marketing tools of 20 data sources from their technology stack to the data lake via API interface. The platform ensures 24/7 maintenance-free connection to all services. With Adverity’s out-of-the-box connectivity in the API interface, Vodafone is able to easily build a scalable solution to a number of connected data sources.
Automated Analytics for Unified Real-Time Insights
Through data lake integration, they have optimized the quality and availability of management reports to analyses to impact their day-to-day business. Stakeholders are now delivering clear and quality real-time analyses through upgrading to automated dashboards to save time and personnel resources spent across multiple teams from their previous manual processes.
"With the multitude of marketing campaigns we carry out at Vodafone each year, excellent management is essential - not only for the success of each campaign but also for its efficient implementation and analysis... That's why it was of the utmost importance to not only bring management in-house but also to optimize the data quality and the quality of the resulting analyses. Thanks to our collaboration with partners such as Adverity and AWS, we are now able to do exactly that - and still save massively on costs."
Senior Data Analyst, Vodafone Germany
Challenge
The immense demand for high-quality connectivity services in both B2C and B2B areas requires not only first-class products but also the challenges of marketing their own services in a nearly saturated market and achieving the greatest possible market coverage. To this end, Vodafone conducts more than 150 digital campaigns annually. The scale of these activities demands a clear data structure and excellent analysis capabilities.
Although Vodafone's campaign management had demonstrated success, it came at a high cost. With 20 data silos and multiple accounts within a platform, the use of external service providers caused inefficiencies in managing their campaigns. Alongside these hurdles, data transfers did not run automatically and holistic analyses had to be manually reported. To resolve these pain points, Vodafone finally decided to handle campaign management internally in the future and to completely redesign its data management from scratch.
Solution
During the insourcing process, where all digital services of the agency were brought back into its own responsibility, Vodafone planned a total of six months to build the new reporting structure: The "Project Neuron" - short for NEutral Userfriendly Real-time measurement ONline platform - was born.
In the future, a data lake should be fed from the stack with more than 20 Martech silos, which would enable campaign management to be analyzed from a single source. The restructuring will be accomplished through four steps. First, the creation of a centralized data lake that would unite the numerous data silos into a single "source of truth". Then it will be accompanied by the storage of the data in the cloud - offering significantly more scalable data storage capabilities than on-premise (Amazon Web Services will be responsible for storing this data in the future)
Secondly, Vodafone aimed to streamline the data transfers in-house - not only with its own solutions but also with Adverity, an automation solution. This also made it possible to generate real-time insights - from a single solution with clear, interactive dashboards. Adverity ensured this pillar of the new strategy: automated data transfers with plug-and-play functionality and out-of-the-box connectivity - a massive gain compared to the previous status quo, where fixing bugs and regular maintenance required enormous resources and time.
Impact
Project Neuron was a complete success: all data now exists exclusively in Vodafone's central data lake, which has significantly improved the quality of return in analytical insights and resources spent.
Up to 20% of resources for manual data acquisition are saved weekly across multiple teams, allowing for investment in data analysis instead. With the elimination of manual data acquisition, data quality has also increased by 80%. These outcomes reflected in higher confidence in the data as well as significantly reduced coordination effort.
Thanks to the empowerment of stakeholders, campaign assets were optimized faster in the first six months, resulting in an improvement in return on marketing investment (+8%). Adverity in this context provides connectivity of all used tools based on cloud infrastructure from Amazon Web Services, ensuring not only process automation but also stability. There were almost no outages in live operation in six months.
The deployed services also save immense personnel time, and resources of their own data engineers were returned to be productively spent to impact other components of the business.. Ultimately, the platform's scalability was an important factor for looking ahead to make it easy to integrate additional departments. Due to Adverity’s scalable solution, Vodafone plans to integrate four additional departments in the current year through with AWS cloud and eliminate the need for time-consuming, independent maintenance.
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