Case Study
Backcountry, leading eCommerce Retail Company Saved Costs by Moving to Google and Looker BI Solution
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Jade helped Backcountry on their platform modernization journey by migrating reports from the legacy BI (OBI) to Google’s cloud-based visualization platform Looker. As part of the migration efforts, we have built several explorers to enable self-serve BI capabilities, migrated over 400+ reports/looks, and built several dashboards in Looker.
This effort wasn’t just about technology. It is also about business processes and people working together to do what suits our customers as an organization. The theme was to ensure that the modern business intelligence capabilities platform supports legacy functions as far as possible, empowers businesses with more analytical capabilities and switching to the modern business intelligence platform doesn’t interrupt business.
Client: Backcountry
Industry: e-commerce/retail
About the Client
Backcountry.com is an online specialty retailer that sells clothing and outdoor recreation gear for hiking, camping, road biking, mountain biking, rock climbing, winter sports, fly fishing, kayaking, rafting, road and trail running, and more.
Backcountry’s roots may be in the cloud, but people’s lifestyle revolves around shared adventures in the real world. With their new collection of stores, one can get personalized outdoor advice—and swap trail stories—with their Gearheads and get help with everything from custom bike builds and camp kits to mountain town-style pointers.
Products & Services
- BI and Analytics
- From OBI to Looker
Business Requirements
- Analyze OBIEE reports and dashboards by business intelligence capabilities and functions and rationalize them into logically related data views.
- Decommission OBIEE on-premise platform by migrating analytical reporting workloads to Looker.
- Design and Configure Best-Practice in the Looker business intelligence environment.
- Enable Self-Service BI, where applicable.
- Incrementally rollout Looker BI and Reporting solution ensuring uninterrupted data delivery to the business.
- User training where necessary to overcome adoption challenges after each build cycle.
Business Challenges
Being on the legacy BI platform for a while, user adoption of cloud BI solutions was challenging
Newer tools missing some key user intuitive features, a couple to name are Period Rolling and Analysis as filters in another analysis.
These key OBI features that don’t exist in Looker were to be re-engineered & resolved per business need with custom solutions
OBIEE Reports to be converted were very complex than expected & requires a lot of LookML effort.
“Many thanks for your crucial role (Jade) played in the delivery across different phases. Not an easy job to be the business liaison, navigate the technical roadmap, ensure performant code quality, and adhere to project timelines. You did all of that admirably and more. There was even a specific phase where the teams worked together to deliver through the Showstoppers –features that Looker doesn’t provide out of the box but are critical for our business decision-making. Thank you all again for getting this effort live in production."
Prasad Govekar, Director of Data and Analytics
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