How HNI Drives Manufacturing Digital Transformation with Data Pipelines
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Microsoft Azure
- Oracle Cloud
- Ascend
- Azure Synapse
- Power BI
Tech Stack
- Cloud Computing
- Data Pipelines
- Data Lake
- Data Warehousing
- APIs
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
HNI Corporation is a global leader in workplace furnishings and residential building products. The company generates $2.2B in revenue and employs 8,500 people. HNI was already running some applications on Azure and using Oracle applications in Oracle Cloud. The mission of their data science team is to create business value across all of HNI. The team has a broad skill set of data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts. As the team continued to scale, they required a platform that could scale with them.
The Challenge
HNI Corporation, a global leader in workplace furnishings and residential building products, was in the midst of a planned five-year transformation from seasonal bulk orders by big distributors to customized orders by dealers, individuals, and enterprises. This required a refactoring of the management of the supply chain by taking control of the data from ordering systems, ERP, and fulfillment systems. The COVID-19 pandemic and disrupted office and work-from-home environments forced HNI to speed up changes to how it does business, requiring a solution with flexibility and speed as a cornerstone for transformation. The data science and analytics team at HNI needed a platform that could scale with them, minimize cross-functional dependencies, reduce time-to-pipeline production, and refocus on the logic versus the infrastructure.
The Solution
HNI found Ascend, a platform that revolutionized the speed and ease by which the data team gets pipelines up and running. Ascend’s ability to expose the data as an API that is fast enough to be consumed directly by dashboards empowered HNI’s data team to launch pipelines in hours, avoid dumping results into a database with yet another API on top. The team taps into the ERP to pull it directly into the HNI data lake on Azure. From there, the team used Ascend to ingest it into their pipelines of transformation logic that processes and analyzes it for demand, cost, and delivery impacts. On the customer side, HNI is now testing more real-time order tracking with an application built on Azure. The data team created a separate environment for Ascend to run inside HNI’s Azure subscription, which was also easier to pass through the security team.
Operational Impact
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