In the rapidly evolving domain of education, each school year brings changes in reporting requirements and the installation of new systems. Bloomington Public Schools’ (BPS)  legacy architecture did not provide a robust environment to facilitate change, with data loads taking 6-8 hours and breaking down at least once a week. 

A dependence on Filemaker Pro for data flows, but a team lacking the necessary training to generate insights from the system, led to a bottle-neck with a sole database administrator to generate reports in Tableau. This in turn led to costly delays, and an organizational lack of transparency and trust in the results.  

BPS wanted to modernize its data environment with a solution to enable the data team to more efficiently manage their data. They needed seamless integration with their existing  Tableau reporting without impacting end users, and better documentation on their data processing requirements. 

Specifically, BPS was looking for a solution with the following characteristics: 

• A cloud data platform to store their analytics-ready data 
• Cloud-based data integration and transformation capabilities that were similar or  superior to Filemaker to facilitate the data transfer and cleansing processes 
• Ingest data from applications via API’s, from on premises data warehouses, and  from CSV files 
• Transfer data back into SFTP folders and on premises data warehouses 
• Automate and orchestrate data cleansing and standardizing processes 
• Create specific reporting tables for Tableau to connect to and pull data from

BPS consulted with DataDrive, a Minneapolis area consulting firm, who recommended Matillion ETL  to ingest data from all required sources and build  

data pipelines to integrate and transform within the  Snowflake Data Cloud. Matillion’s user-friendly, low code/no-code solution and deep integration with  Snowflake made it the perfect platform for connecting data sources, building workflows and replicating existing data cleansing processes.  
 

Matillion’s out of the box compatibility with BPS’ existing AWS instance made the process of pulling data into BPS’ Snowflake Data Cloud running on AWS virtually seamless. As a result,  BPS was able to get its new modern data environment up and running before the beginning of the new school year, ensuring no disruptions to its data needs.  

BPS was able to reduce the complexity of setting up and maintaining their workflows with  Matillion’s easy to use drag and drop interface and data is now actively flowing from each data source through Matillion into Snowflake. Tableau provides BPS users with accurate and consistent data views and reports.

Matillion has made it easy to move data from many disparate sources into the BPS  Snowflake Data Cloud, providing a single source of consistent data for all users. The user-friendly interface, ability to create data pipelines and manage data flows virtually without any code, enabled BPS’ data team to quickly ramp up, reducing errors, lowering overall maintenance costs and freeing up a significant amount of time for data administrators. 

BPS can now expand responsibility for the management of its data analytics environment to additional staff members, making it much easier to provide higher quality data to its users on time, maintaining data security and integrity, whilst generating faster reports with more accurate data. 

BPS is investigating the possibility of moving additional district data into their Snowflake Data Cloud in order to provide more useful information and generate more comprehensive reports, both for BPS  staff as well as BPS students and their families. BPS’ data team is also working with their Special Education Department to optimize how data gets transformed within Matillion.

• Connected 8 disparate applications, including the student information system, to Snowflake Data Cloud in time for the start of the school year
• 6-8 hours to complete overnight loads reduced to 30 minutes
• Reduction in breakdown of data loads from once a week minimum, to zero

BPS is a medium-sized school district in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota. BPS has around 700 employees and serves more than 11,000 students from kindergarten all the way through high school.