Loyalty Rewards Company Case Study: Building a Data Modernization Initiative

We partnered with a loyalty rewards company to deliver a data modernization initiative for a Fortune 100 agricultural equipment company’s Internal Loyalty Business Unit.

About the Loyalty Reward Company

The loyalty reward company is well known for their loyalty programs. They work on many projects including creative, technology and data. We partnered with them to work on a project for a well known agricultural machinery and equipment company.

The Problem

• The agricultural equipment company’s International Loyalty Business Unit approached North Labs for assistance in transforming their long-standing data program.
• Before working with North Labs, the Business Unit had a fragmented, incomplete view of their international distribution network, and was unable to reward distributors correctly for consistent sales growth.
• Data sources included international transaction data, which carried its own considerations from an international tax rate perspective as well as financial integration into a global financial system.
• Data refresh cycles took a minimum of six weeks between updates, leaving the internal team users with stagnant, incorrect data.
• Business intelligence was being conducted with long-standing Tableau licenses, which totaled seven figures per year in fees.

The Goal

The primary goals of the International Loyalty Business Unit were to:

• Reduce program operating costs to an acceptable level
• Reduce data refresh cadence to at least once per week
• Measure an upward trajectory in data quality

The Solution

• North Labs introduced the company to a Redshift/Snowflake hybrid architecture, and brought a well-architected approach to the implementation of a net-new program architecture.
• North Labs also introduced the team to QuickSight and ran a successful POC with Amazon’s internal QuickSight team, which resulted in a full production implementation, moving them away from Tableau

The Outcome

• Data refresh cadence reduced from 6 weeks to 1 day
• ETL job optimization with Matillion improved from nearly two weeks of runtime with legacy tooling, to under 30 minutes with Matillion
• Scalable data warehousing and enterprise-wide quality control measures with Snowflake
• 93% reduction in Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with Amazon QuickSight compared to legacy BI tools
• Fully-programmatic data environment, requiring virtually zero ongoing administration
• Contribution to a 16% YoY lift in international loyalty revenues

‍

‍

‍