The Bleckmann story
For over 150 years, Bleckmann has provided high-quality logistics service to its clients and has evolved from a transport supplier in the textile industry into a world-class logistics partner for international fashion and lifestyle brands. Bleckmann’s Business Intelligence team focuses on data warehouse management and integration, data engineering, and building dashboards used for process optimization. They use their data intelligence for a whole range of applications: business decision making, operational and management reporting and are building a data stack for advanced analytics. Bleckmann uses VaultSpeed to get their data structured and ready to analyze fast.
Challenge
At first, Bleckmann worked with source data models only. This brought about data silos and created barriers to information sharing and collaboration across departments. Getting a holistic view was painstakingly slow, due to the lack of a centralized data management system and inconsistencies in data across the silos. There was no single source of the truth because different people within the team worked with data differently. Without a unified data platform, there was no single way of interpretation and the team did not have a 360-degree view of all their systems.
Why VaultSpeed
Bleckmann wanted to build a Data Vault and VaultSpeed’s expertise in Data Vault automation made it the obvious choice for this task. “If not
for VaultSpeed, we wouldn’t have built a Data Vault”, says Tim and adds that it was crucial that the solution would be accessible for a junior team with no experience in Data Vault. The easy-to-use visual interface, the expertise of the support team consisting of VaultSpeed support engineers and DWH experts from local service partner Datasense, and the possibility to avoid extensive coding were definitely considered an
asset. The well-run pilot gave Bleckmann a first-hand experience of these benefits.
Solution
The Bleckmann data team mastered Data Vault automation very fast: experienced engineers felt comfortable with the tool within a month after training, team members with no previous experience — within a year. When questions or difficulties occurred, Bleckmann received help, advice, and knowledge from the VaultSpeed support team. Bleckmann has benefited from a well-structured Data Vault where changes can be tracked and incorporated easily. The company obtained a complete and accurate picture of its data and can easily do what before seemed impossible. For example, Bleckmann currently has ten WMSs, many of which have one database schema per customer for 300 clients, so keeping track of the progress and of how many pieces were processed becomes a demanding task. With the VaultSpeed hub grouping system, the company can easily integrate different business concepts in their WMS from all 300 source schemas and see how many units are processed at a given time.
