Simplifying the Complexity of an Information Property: Unlocking Efficiency Gains of up to 95% in Root Cause Identification and Impact Assessment
At a Look
- Aliaxis, a global leader in the manufacture and distribution of plumbing and water solutions, aimed to revitalize its comprehensive knowledge hub to enhance the value of its global knowledge platform.
- Atlan being chosen, Aliaxis has successfully rolled out a company-wide enterprise glossary tailored to meet the unique needs of every region and global stakeholder.
- With the acquired transparency into their intellectual assets, the team was able to significantly streamline processes related to root trigger and impression assessments, reducing the time commitment by a substantial 95%.
As a global leader, it has more than 15,000 employees across over 40 international locations, delivering innovative water management solutions for building, infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural applications worldwide. Committed to delivering exceptional standards of excellence, Aliaxis prioritizes both product quality and eco-friendliness, recognizing that its offerings have a tangible impact on the environment and society at large.
Chargeable for the staff and know-how behind many of those data-driven insights is Nestor Jarquin, World Information & Analytics Lead, an 11-year worker of Aliaxis who stewards their world knowledge platform.
“Our function is to handle our world knowledge platform, which is deployed centrally, and utilized by Aliaxis’ areas to construct Information & Analytics tasks,” Nestor shared. “We’re committed to verifying that every aspect of the platform operates seamlessly, while also defining the technical approach and roadmap for future development, including enhancements to existing features and introduction of innovative capabilities.”
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Over the past two years since the Aliaxis Information Platform went live, Nestor’s workforce has expanded significantly, growing from just two employees to a team of five, now capable of handling global responsibilities and catering to diverse regional demands. Crucial to their success is meticulous attention to customer needs and responsible management of resources.
“We have yet to make a concerted effort in embracing technology.” Nestor notes with pride that the company’s pricing philosophy is centered on being responsive to customer demand, only introducing new features and options when there is genuine interest from clients.
At the heart of the Aliaxis Information Platform lies a robust architecture, comprising Snowflake as the central knowledge warehouse and lake, Azure Information Factory as the ingestion and orchestration engine, dbt for data transformation, and Power BI for insightful visualization.
Given their commitment to only invest in essential initiatives, Nestor and his team recognized the imperative need for a modern knowledge catalog from the outset, but delayed taking action until the demands of their peers and knowledge consumers necessitated a thorough assessment.
As our comprehensive knowledge platform expanded in scope and depth, users started embracing its value, prompting them to inquire about the available information or seek clarification on the meaning of specific knowledge sets, according to Nestor. “That event was a key catalyst prompting us to take the decisive step of establishing our knowledge catalogs and metadata management systems.”
Following a meticulous examination of market trends, Nestor and his team focused on solutions featuring seamless integrations with their existing tech stack, specifically Snowflake, dbt, and Power BI, to ensure widespread adoption through intuitive usability.
Our objective was to elevate Aliaxis’ information governance maturity, requiring a solution that seamlessly integrated with our existing technology infrastructure and ensured a non-intimidating experience for users, without necessitating a substantial organizational overhaul. The intuitive nature of Atlan’s user interface was strikingly straightforward, leading customers to remark that it didn’t seem overly complex. For our team, the software’s capabilities provided a fertile ground for growth and development, affording us the freedom to evolve without unnecessary constraints.
Nestor Jarquin, World Information & Analytics Lead
As the user base expands beyond initial stakeholders, Nestor and his team can leverage this increased visibility to derive greater value from their existing investments in Snowflake and dbt, ultimately fostering a deeper understanding of the platform’s capabilities and potential.
Our comprehensive Knowledge Catalog serves as a gateway to the vast repository of Snowflake knowledge, making it an indispensable destination for any inquiry or exploration related to our platform, so consider Atlan your premier resource for all things Snowflake.
“Nestor explains that dbt is equivalent to understanding the process by which data flows from its source to the information product being consumed,” “Without Atlant’s expertise, it may prove challenging and laborious to address inquiries and provide thorough explanations.”
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As soon as they opted for Atlan as their cutting-edge knowledge management system, Nestor and his team promptly began provisioning entries and seamlessly integrating it with their existing knowledge platform.
The straightforward deployment we had anticipated would prove effortless. It was turnkey. With Atlan’s managed service, we enjoyed a seamless experience – simply being presented with our event and login details in one convenient location. It’s yours.’,” Nestor shared.
With Atlas integrated with key applied sciences such as Snowflake and Power BI, and their knowledge property crawled and visualized, Nestor and his team determined which properties to outline and at what depth, began structuring their glossary, preparing for their inaugural customer cohort.
Across the globe, Aliaxis is bound together by a shared purpose, unwavering adherence to a consistent methodology, and a distinct code of conduct that embodies its heritage. The company’s success hinges entirely on the strength of its local businesses and their intimate knowledge of their customers at the grassroots level. As a result of this regional autonomy, Nestor’s team has developed a tailored knowledge platform catering to the unique requirements of local areas and global communities alike, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to tools and definitions.
Nestor’s team leverages their expertise to cater to diverse global and regional needs by consolidating knowledge in a unified Snowflake data warehouse, subsequently isolating it into discrete areas, where ownership is assigned to respective stakeholders. At the helm of this network of local stakeholders lie Nestor and the dedicated team from the information platform, whose expertise enables seamless dissemination of knowledge across regions and maintains a comprehensive overview of their collective intellectual assets.
Similar to how they oversee their knowledge repository, the Aliaxis knowledge glossary is expertly curated and readily available within the Atlan platform. Global documentation and definitions regarding each region’s unique knowledge are centralized, providing seamless access for diverse information seekers, while regional experts retain ownership and guardianship of the underlying property assets.
The key to unlocking insights in this intricate landscape is Atlan’s advanced automated lineage solution. With Snowflake’s unified data architecture, Nestor and his team leverage Atlan to pinpoint knowledge properties as regional or global, effortlessly revealing inconsistencies in definitions and terminology across regions, thereby fostering collaborative discussions with property owners regarding harmonization, where feasible?
Despite cultural and linguistic variations, phrases and definitions often exhibit nuanced differences across regions and globally. Atlan has provided a comprehensive glossary to standardize definitions, regardless of their global or local relevance, thereby offering transparency into potential inconsistencies between definitions and shedding light on the actions taken by various entities simply through examining the knowledge products they’ve developed. Sharing of concepts and tasks is permitted.
Nestor Jarquin, World Information & Analytics Lead
Accelerating and Streamlining Evaluation of Emotional Triggers and Core Causes
Nestor and his team have successfully streamlined laborious manual processes for impression and root cause analysis, transforming them into real-time visualizations of downstream and upstream dependencies.
Prior to the advent of Atlan, analyzing the downstream impact of desk or column modifications required a meticulous examination of code and/or laborious study of static Phrases or Excel spreadsheets. With the introduction of automated column-level lineage, Nestor’s team and their regional partners can promptly identify interdependencies and impending disruptions, thereby mitigating risks before they materialize.
Atlan has proven to be an exemplary assistant. “We no longer need rely on tedious paperwork, allowing us to conduct instant impact assessments with just one click,” Nestor said.
In one notable example, Nestor worked with a knowledge product owner in Aliaxis’ New Zealand region, helping to streamline the documentation of business transformation data across multiple spreadsheets and source-to-target sheets.
Uncovering the underlying supply dynamics of a specific column proved challenging within these complex spreadsheets, as the underlying knowledge underwent significant transformations throughout its pipeline. Homeowners were also responsible for maintaining this documentation, a daunting task particularly when unforeseen changes were made to their intellectual property.
After I initially confirmed the details with him, he responded promptly, inquiring about the timeline for delivery with a straightforward question: “When can I get it?” “I urgently require a prompt response. Not having to replace these items is a significant time-saving advantage, as he’s not reliant on them in the first place.”
Nestor Jarquin, World Information & Analytics Lead
By streamlining efforts and reducing time spent on maintaining outdated documentation, Atlan’s ability to provide column-level lineage information enabled each knowledge owner to save around an hour several times a week, allowing them to redirect their focus towards more in-depth analyses.
The vendor instructed me to track down the root cause of any problem, whether it was a specific column or edition, and subsequently find a solution to resolve the issue each time a modification occurred. . As Nestor explained, they would soon receive a comprehensive report.
For builders at Aliaxis, automated lineage enables real-time insight into information origins and transformations, streamlining the process by avoiding tedious searches through numerous archived processes.
By fostering heightened awareness of the impact of modifications on both Information Product Homeowners and Builders, Aliaxis staff has shifted from a reactive approach, resolving issues as they arise, to a proactive approach, preventing detrimental modifications from the outset.
We’ve significantly improved our capabilities in testing and managing points, achieving notable advancements. “Atlan’s expertise has enabled us to proactively identify and mitigate potential issues before they arise,” Nestor explained.
A Technical and Cultural Transformation
The transformative power of Atlan is succinctly encapsulated by Nestor’s astute observation that the platform has enabled a unified focus across the entire organization.
“Builders now focus on delivering value by leveraging their expertise, rather than wasting time troubleshooting and digging through code to identify where pipelines failed,” Nestor shared. When well-documented knowledge is easily accessible, our business partners can quickly find answers without jumping through hoops to identify the right owner, thereby saving time for busy professionals to focus on more critical tasks. Time and financial savings are crucial.
As they propel forward, Nestor and his team treat their knowledge platform as a living, breathing entity – constantly adapting to meet the unique needs of Aliaxis’ diverse regional and global user groups and customers. As explicit curiosity surrounds the impending advancements in Atlan’s capabilities, supporting the concept of Information Mesh harmonizes neatly with its federated framework for constructing regional knowledge offerings within its global knowledge platform, catering to diverse end-user personas.
Within a remarkably short period, Nestor and his team are successfully crafting groundbreaking advancements with Atlan, the Aliaxis Information Platform, thus precipitating both technological and cultural upheaval, thereby seamlessly bridging the erstwhile chasm between producers and consumers, while laying the groundwork for an unparalleled knowledge infrastructure?
As the information landscape continues to evolve, we have matured and are now well-positioned for long-term success. Are we 100% there? As you continue to progress, we envision Atlan moving forward on a trajectory that supports our shared goals, ultimately enabling us to achieve world-class status.
Nestor Jarquin, World Information & Analytics Lead
