At a glance
Industry
Manufacturing
Location
New Zealand and Australia
Challenge
Create a data exchange that flexibly processes and publishes information to make data the heart of a large, dynamic organization.
Success Highlights
- 3 year acceleration of modernization program
- 80% saving in data quality efforts
- 10% improvement in business process execution
Our approach
FletcherTech and Cognizant partnered closely to begin work on the Datahub. Together they built clarity around the required design for this central data exchange and how it needed to function. The team was careful to define the business objectives ahead of the technical solution.
The aim was to establish a dynamic system to transform data into a company-wide asset, with the Datahub preparing data for distribution between company systems without being overly prescriptive or structured in ways that could become restrictive over time. Through APIs, FletcherTech could onboard Fletcher Building business units to facilitate data exchange, enabling better alignment with customer needs and business objectives.
The team identified three key use cases where the Datahub would be called to action:
- Whenever an event change is triggered in a business system
- Whenever a system responds to an event to request more information, and
- as an analytics and reporting layer with a view across all business units.
Cognizant brought a diverse technology team to the engagement, with expertise across architecture, data, cloud and integration engineering. Cognizant and FletcherTech worked together to design the capabilities required in the Datahub and how GCP features mapped to these needs.
Piloting and onboarding
A pilot program was devised to ingest, process and publish data from Fletcher Steel’s ERP system to validate the Datahub design and the Delivery Management System built to manage data flows. A second integration was implemented to an e-commerce system to further validate the effectiveness of the Datahub and its data pipelines. From here, the speed of further business unit integration could increase as Datahub design work ensured scalability and stability.
Each business unit's unique needs required careful attention and regular adjustments to the plan to ensure benefits were being unlocked through the Datahub’s integrations. FletcherTech and Cognizant formed a high trust partnership where honest discourse helped maintain focus on the high-level objectives and to find smarter, cheaper and more effective ways to continue the journey forward.
Business outcomes
The Datahub has resulted in significant positive financial outcomes for Fletcher Building thanks to improved delivery management tracking. Along with savings through system modernization and decommissioning older reporting and analytics systems, every business that is onboarded to the new e-commerce system is expected to see overall savings to their business.
While the Fletcher Datahub is an ongoing journey, with many more business units to be integrated in the future, the foundational product is in place and data is now available as a decoupled asset across multiple business units. In the most significant early successes, the Datahub now provides a customer-facing e-commerce reporting module that requires minimal effort or overhead.
Cognizant (Nasdaq-100: CTSH) engineers modern businesses. We help our clients modernize technology, reimagine processes and transform experiences so they can stay ahead in our fast-changing world. Together, we’re improving everyday life. See how at www.cognizant.com or @cognizant.
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