United States
Daktronics is an American electronics company specializing in designing, manufacturing, installing, and servicing digital LED display technology. This includes stadium scoreboards, large-format video boards, digital billboards, message signage, and audio systems. Daktronics services customers in over 120 countries and employs more than 2,500 people worldwide.
Reducing manual effort in simplifying data alterations
Daktronics’ data team reached out to Cloudera just as it was about to change some source fields in various extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes within the data environment. Before implementing the source field changes, Daktronics needed to understand the full impact across multiple systems.
This was a gating step to the initial project; any changes in the source field loading or calculation would impact many reports and tables across the environment. Therefore, Daktronics would need to find every report and table affected by the change in the source field to conduct an impact analysis before making any changes. And history had proved that process was nowhere near error-proof.
In the past, teams would spend days, and sometimes even weeks, manually tracing the data flow to determine how planned changes would affect specific reports and tables. However, even with all that time, there were still slip-ups and reports that were initially missed in the mapping process. Manual impact analysis was simply not accurate – and certainly not efficient.
Streamlining data entry and sourcing
Understanding Daktronics' challenges, the Cloudera team highlighted Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage as the missing puzzle piece. , With automated data intelligence and an easy, scalable SaaS model. Getting Data Lineage up and running was quick and painless. The onboarding process consisted of a one-hour session for metadata extraction and training. After that, the Daktronics team received the link to the platform and began customizing it to meet requirements.
Data Lineage enables them to discover every location of every report and table impacted by the change throughout the multi-vendor data environment in seconds. Analysts can now instantly reverse-engineer all the data in a report and understand the impact analysis, saving the company significant time and resources previously spent manually tracing the data flow.
“With Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage, Daktronics can deliver new projects to the organization quickly and with more trust and confidence in the data. It’s been a major time saver for their team, allowing them to use resources and time more strategically,” said Zinette Ezra, Senior Director of Product Management, Cloudera
Data Lineage makes a measurable impact, sets a foundation for scalable growth
Right away, Cloudera Octopai Data Lineage saved Daktronics countless hours by replacing manual processes with automation. Daktronics no longer needs to use a homegrown report tracker service or SQL Search to conduct impact analysis. Teams no longer have to dive into individual SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) packages to find answers, one of the tasks that took the most time, especially since only data developers could perform this task.
Using Data Lineage accelerated the initial migration and set a strategy for the future.
Impact analysis in minutes: Projects that used to take analysts weeks or months to complete now take just a few minutes with Data Lineage.
Less manual effort, more insight: With lineage capabilities automated, the team can focus on drawing insights from the data instead of searching for it.
Faster business outcomes: New use cases can be deployed quickly and efficiently, speeding time to value and results.
