Timextender
B&S is a large retail company built around global reach. It connects suppliers and consumers across five segments, beauty, food, liquors, personal care, and travel retail, and covers the value chain in between: sourcing, warehousing and logistics, distribution, and digital commerce.
Richard Booij manages its BI team, responsible for reporting and dashboarding across the organization. Moving that much product through that many channels depends on a production database that can keep up, and for a while, Richard's team wasn't sure theirs could.
The Bottleneck
"Before Timextender, the biggest challenge that we were facing was actually very long loading times," says Richard Booij, manager of the BI team at B&S. "Too little time during the night to get everything processed."
That nightly squeeze meant more than an inconvenience. When a load ran long, there wasn't always a way to recover before the business day started, and reliability suffered right along with speed.
"After Timextender, we saw significant performance improvement on loading times and reliability" - Richard Booij
Choosing a Platform, Gaining Control
Richard's team compared several options before settling on Timextender. What stood out was multi-user development and how the platform scaled alongside Azure, "which have drastically improved our performance," he says.
The advantage that stood out most after migrating was control. With incremental loading in place and data quality improved, B&S stopped absorbing failed nightly loads as lost time.
"The advantage that we had after we migrated to Timextender was that we were more in control of our ETL. The data quality was better." - Richard Booij
Richard describes what changed when a load did run into problems: "When we face problems during the night, in the past we used to say, 'okay, tomorrow is another day.' Right now we can scale up and do our ETL processes in a lot less time than we could before." For a production database, that's the difference between losing a day and losing almost nothing.
Clearing the Backlog
Timextender tells partners and customers they can expect to do ten times the work in the same amount of time. For B&S, that held up in practice. The team came into the migration with a substantial backlog, some of it sitting on what Richard calls the "someday, maybe" list.
"Timextender said that you can do 10X the amount of work that you could do before. It's actually the case in our situation as well. We had an enormous backlog before we moved to Timextender, which we completely picked up in 6-12 months after migration." - Richard Booij
That shift shows up in how B&S handles new requests too. Work that used to wait now moves in a matter of days. "When we have some new data requests, we can adapt a lot faster and get the data available in, let's say, one to two days." says Richard.
For B&S, the shift away from long overnight loads meant a backlog cleared in months instead of years, and a BI team that can now say yes to a new data request in days rather than sprints. If long loading times, reliability issues, or a growing backlog sound familiar, Book a Demo to see what Timextender can do for your team.