Boosting Supply Chain Performance with Modern Intelligence
Logtek cut costs by 60% and gained real-time insights with Cloudaeon, optimising supply chain efficiency and saving £7K/month.
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Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged.
Introduction
Since 1996, Logtek has been one of the prominent transit packaging solutions providers. They provide Returnable Transit Packaging (RTP) solutions to leading retailers like Aldi and M&S, along with food manufacturers, food service operations and growers that make up their perishable goods supply chain.
Logtek’s services are essential to sustainability, waste reduction and cost efficiency. They reduce disposable packaging use through the rental, maintenance and distribution of asset tracked transit containers.
Logtek has long faced retail supply chain challenges, in the highly demanding retail sector, consumers' demand fresh produce in huge volumes whilst retail shelf space is at a premium. This makes forecasting a priority and Logtek plays a crucial role in delivering accurate quantities on time, every time to meet stringent SLAs.
Partnering with Cloudaeon, their goal was to improve their data management systems, enhance operational efficiency and optimise costs whilst increasing capability and capacity of their logistics network.
The collaboration between Cloudaeon and Logtek illustrates the transformative power of advanced data management and analytics in addressing complex supply chain challenges.
Challenges
Accurate Asset Management
Logtek handles 6 million packaging trays each week, linking 250 suppliers, 8 thousand products, and 2,100 stores. They must ensure this huge volume arrives at the right destination at the right time and in the right quantity. Delivery is only half the equation, Logtek must also collect empty trays from each store, coordinating their return to multiple logistics hubs across an extensive network of third party logistics firms.
Dealing with Peak Seasons
The challenges Logtek had to overcome increased significantly during peak periods like Christmas when order volumes surge. During the holiday season, food retailers need to secure enough trays to avoid inventory shortages and missed revenue opportunities that are tightly aligned to complex demand forecasting models.
To ensure timely and accurate deliveries, Logtek demands precise asset tracking data that is available in real-time and flexible enough to meet daily changes, to ensure no store is left without the desired inventory levels.
Tiny issues from inaccurate or outdated data led to delivery errors, causing in store shortages, negatively impacting customer satisfaction and triggering SLA penalties. Inaccurate Data Logtek used to sync data only once a day due to the limitation of a third party tool. This fixed schedule lacked flexibility and hampered their decision making ability.
Achieving accurate data was essential to maintain supplier tray balance. At peak times, maintaining enough tray balance for every customer became a challenge due to inaccurate data. Inaccurate contractor data also led to numerous challenges in achieving effective management and timely delivery.
Cloudaeon Solutions Delivery
Modernising the LogTek Data Platform with Databricks
Cloudaeon proposed rearchitecting Logtek’s data platform to Databricks. This migration was to avoid replicating the problems of the old Snowflake platform onto the new Databricks platform. Databricks was selected for native support of Spark which provides superior performance in the advanced analytics use cases Logtek required.
The estimated work to manually migrate, validate and deploy Snowflake tables and views to Databricks exceeded 5,000 man hours. This wasn’t practical, so Cloudaeon developed a Snowflake to Databricks accelerator to automate the migration of tables, views and stored procedures.
This accelerator reduced the manual effort by 90%.
Databricks excels at real-time analytics by providing a unified platform that combines batch and streaming data. Delta Lake is used for reliable, low latency updates, compliant with ACID transactions with features like Photon for performance optimisation and auto scaling. Databricks delivers the cost efficient agility Logtek demands.
Utilising Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) for Unstructured Data
Cloudaeon created accelerators to handle the migration from Snowflake to ADLS and to process ongoing data change from SQL Server into ADLS. Initial historical data was transferred directly from Snowflake to ADLS using a custom ETL accelerator.
ADLS offered a low cost, scalable storage solution, integrated well with Databricks and supported the Medallion Architecture.
It provided scalable storage with a pay per use model, reducing storage costs by nearly 60%.
Delivering Near Real-time Insights with Change Data Capture (CDC)
Fivetran CDC was configured to ensure data accuracy with near to real-time ingestion by avoiding the need to process the entire dataset repeatedly. It captured the data in the source system, such as inserts, updates and deletes ensuring efficient tracking and synchronisation across systems, moving only the modified data.
Managing Access, Lineage and Governance with Unity Catalog
Databricks Unity Catalog was used for governance and security, managing user access and permissions through a centralised repository. It ensured robust governance by aligning data access policies with organisational requirements.
Providing Business Users with Real-time Insights
Power BI was integrated with Databricks' Gold Layer to enable dynamic reporting, featuring custom visualisations and filters tailored to business needs. The refined data in the Gold Layer optimised reporting efficiency and improved dashboard performance.
Power BI provides comprehensive business intelligence through interactive, real-time insights, empowering stakeholders to make informed decisions and monitor performance.
Upgrading Capability and Capacity
Logtek initially invested in Snowflake as their cloud data Warehouse. While Logtek successfully powered its business intelligence function, its exponential growth led to scalability challenges and rising real-time analytics costs, making Snowflake uneconomical.
Over time, long running queries, poorly optimised workloads and increasing data volumes began to inflate compute costs. Logtek found an increasing number of outdated ETL processes and redundant data pipelines were hindering their capability development.
Whilst increasing reliance on third party technologies added further complexity. Cloudaeon was engaged to re-imagine their data platform for real-time analytics and enhanced cost efficiency.
Results
Cost Reduction: Logtek saved between £6K and £7K a month by eliminating third party tools and reducing compute and storage costs. ADLS provided scalable storage with a pay per use model, that slashed storage costs by nearly 60%.
Improved Efficiency: Reduced data sync cycles from 24 times a day to 6 times a day, optimising processing time and server usage.
Enhanced Governance and Security: Unity Catalog provided clear user access management, audit control and policy enforcement.
Future Readiness: Simplified data objects and Medallion Architecture provided better data organisation, in a future ready architecture with modular components, ensuring scalability and adaptability.
Data Driven Decision Making: Faster , more accurate reporting was enabled with Power BI, empowering stakeholders with actionable insights. Resulting in a 2x improvement in decision making with near real-time data, leading to more efficient management of transit units.
Conclusion
The collaboration between Cloudaeon and Logtek has fundamentally transformed Logtek’s data platform, enabling it to meet the demands of a fast moving retail supply chain with precision and efficiency.
By migrating to Databricks, integrating Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) and implementing Fivetran real-time Change Data Capture (CDC), Logtek has significantly improved data accuracy, scalability and operational agility.
This transformation has delivered tangible business benefits, including a 60% reduction in storage costs, monthly savings of £7K, and a 2x improvement in decision making efficiency.
The introduction of Unity Catalog has enhanced governance and security, while Power BI integration has empowered stakeholders with real-time, actionable insights.
By eliminating reliance on third party tools, optimising data pipelines and adopting a future ready Medallion Architecture, Logtek is now equipped with a high performance, cost efficient and scalable data platform. This has positioned them for continued growth and innovation, ensuring they remain at the forefront of supply chain efficiency, sustainability and customer service excellence.
Cloudaeon’s expertise in data engineering, cloud transformation and advanced analytics has enabled Logtek to not only modernise its operations but also build a resilient, agile and intelligent data ecosystem, ready to meet future challenges head on.
