2021 Emerald Award Winners: Congratulations to Novartis, TUI Group, and Cisco Meraki!
Plenty of enterprises talk about doing more with data. Some are actively improving the way their data teams prepare data and increasing their employees’ access to data. And some organizations are out there blazing trails with data, realizing significant business impact, giving their data teams hours and even months of their valuable time back, and innovating their products, services, and customer interactions. We are recognizing those companies at the forefront of modern analytics with our inaugural Emerald Awards, announced today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas.
Congratulations to our 2021 Emerald Award recipients:
- Novartis Oncology, for Data Innovation
- TUI Group, for having a World-Class Data Team
- Cisco Meraki, for Business Impact
It is so exciting to see these companies using the Matillion data integration and transformation platform to make a difference not only in their business outcomes, but in the world, and the way they serve their customers. Their data analytics programs exemplify what Matillion is all about–making the world’s data useful, and making a huge dent in the universe with insight and information.
Novartis Oncology: Metadata-driven frameworks lead to business transformation in oncology
The Novartis Oncology division takes the Emerald Award for Data Innovation with its metadata-driven frameworks that cover almost every aspect of data engineering, including:
- Rapid data onboarding and ingestion into Snowflake from a variety of source types. This significantly reduced data onboarding and ingestion coding by allowing developers to simply configure pre-defined metadata locations, defining sources and targets. The framework automatically loads, standardizes, audits, and archives the defined source.
- An operational data quality framework, which ensures that incoming data remains consistent with defined thresholds for quality.
Novartis Oncology uses Matillion ETL for Snowflake to ingest, transform, and publish critical data assets that support strategic decision making across Marketing, Sales, Digital, Analytics, and Data Science.
Before using Matillion, the previous data management platform at Novartis could not scale to meet the demands of the business. Integrating and transforming large datasets and creating highly complex business rules for analytics took days. With Matillion and the new frameworks, runtimes have been reduced by 70 to 80 percent and most of the data pipelines and the data mart can be built in less than a few hours.
“The data platform is the foundation for business transformation in US Oncology.”
–Pushpendra Arora, Director, Data Platform and Visual Analytics, Novartis
TUI Group: Using All of Matillion ETL to Help Delight Customers
At TUI Hotels & Resorts, part of one of Europe’s largest travel organizations, customer delight is everything. Rapid insight can mean the difference between an amazing holiday and one that’s just okay. And TUI has been able to leverage all parts of Matillion ETL– including low-code/no-code transformation, Universal Connectivity, and Sync Back – to unify data from an extremely heterogenous IT landscape and use it to get a true 360-degree view of travelers.
Matillion ETL helps the TUI data team easily connect systems and technologies from more than 400 hotels . When TUI started a greenfield project with Matillion ETL two years ago, it was able to view the first real-world data in its business applications within a few days. Today, with pre-built data connectors, the data team can connect a new system (for example, a new hotel within the portfolio) within a few hours. And TUI relies on Universal Connectivity to quickly build connectors for systems with less common systems, also within just a few hours.
The daily workload for the company’s Matillion production instance has 4300 jobs running on an. average day, with approximately 5.7 billion rows of data processed within Matillion ETL in total.
Some of TUI’s more noteworthy recent projects include:
- Creating its own data deduplication system (THE DUDE) that helps the company find multiple representations of the same real-world customer. Before Matillion ETL, TUI was writing plain SQL scripts for the system that ran 2000+ lines of code per script. By porting the implementation to a Matillion ETL, the graphical interface helps the team see clearly shaped code components that make it easy to spot where to make modifications or parameter adjustments.
- The team has been using Sync Back to bring enriched data back into operational systems around the business, such as marketing tools. Business stakeholders realize that the customer data platform, based on Matillion and Snowflake, provides the most complete, up-to-date, and accurate customer data in the company and want it at their fingertips to make near-real-time decisions about customer experience.
TUI is the perfect example of leveraging all of Matillion to act as a data operating system for the business.
“THE DUDE identifies approximately 40 percent of our input records s duplicates…By merging redundant customer profiles we see a more complete picture of our guests and we can send better recommendations for their next vacation, based on a seamless travel history.”
–Kai Wolffram, Head of Analytics, TUI Group
Cisco Meraki: Better business processes, phenomenal business impact
Before Matillion ETL, data at Cisco Meraki lived in silos. SQL scripts existed in random Notepad files and Google Docs, making it difficult to get a 360-degree view of customers. With Matillion, Cisco Meraki was able to create a central repository, where all code lives in one place. The entire analytics team can see and access all flows, giving them full control of data. Reports that used to take weeks can now be generated in hours.
With the ability to extract data from Salesforce, Marketo, and other databases, the Cisco Meraki data team can tell a full story of a lead as it becomes an opportunity, providing attribution to each touchpoint along the way. The data is standardized, visualized in Tableau, and accessed across marketing teams across the globe, simplifying the way that the company envisions and talks about marketing and sales activities happening throughout the customer’s lifecycle.
The business impact is massive. Recently, the enterprise was asked to prove the impact of its SMB campaigns to Cisco, its parent company. Using Matillion, within a couple of hours, the team was able to produce an entire campaigns dashboard in Tableau that showed that SMB campaigns drove a 46x ROI across five quarters. Results are filterable by parent and child campaigns across all geographies over multiple quarters. The company anticipates that the impact will result in a larger budget and make their division a leading offer for Cisco SMB marketing campaigns.
“Even for a non-technical person, it is so easy to understand what is happening with the data…This has transformed conversations with marketers and salespeople, because when they see the flows, they are able to fully understand how the metrics were derived and what is really happening with their data. The business impact is huge…they are now data people too.”
–Hoshang Chenoy, Principal Marketing Intelligence Scientist, Cisco Meraki
And congratulations to our runners-up: Muddy Boots Software/TELUS, Pacific Life, and InnovaFeed
Not only do we want to commend all of our Emerald Award winners, but we want to give a shout out to our runners-up, who also showed some tremendous innovation and business impact with Matillion ETL in the cloud.
- Muddy Boots Software, a division of TELUS Agriculture, earns runner-up for Data Innovation with their impressive use of iteration-driven workflows to apply a common framework to literally hundreds of databases.
- Pacific Life, runner-up for World-Class Data Team, for launching a new insurance product and implementing data integration with a key business partner within 12 weeks–a project that previously would have taken six to eight months to implement.
- InnovaFeed, runner-up for Business Impact, for using Matillion ETL to help track and identify temperature and humidity anomalies and to alert the team, enabling quick response that reduces production loss for their insect-based protein manufacturing.
Congratulations to all of our winners and runners-up! You’re the reason we do what we do here at Matillion.
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