Founded in 1988 and based in London, Punter Southall Group work with pension schemes, employers, insurers, charities and private clients to provide expertise in wealth management, workplace savings, health and protection, and financial data. Punter Southall Analytics (PSA) is a subsidiary of Punter Southall Group.

Challenge

For most companies, building and maintaining a data warehouse for their own data is already a huge challenge. At PSA, they have to create a bespoke data warehouse for each of their customers.

PSA needed an automation tool to create infrastructures, lineage and documentation, and for the change management of such complex, dependent structures containing sensitive data. The company also needed an agnostic tool that would fit around its existing, bespoke infrastructure.

Solution

PSA had a specific list of questions that needed answering in a proof of concept trial:

• Does it meet compliance and auditing needs?
• Can it shift big amounts of data into and out of the Microsoft Azure data warehouse quickly?
• Are transformations quick enough?
• Can we see how things get transformed between the load stage and then ultimately the data warehouse area in the lineage?

Steven chose WhereScape because he already knew what the software can do. Like many new WhereScape customers, the champion behind the initiative had used WhereScape with such success at a previous employer that they wanted to replicate this again at their new company.

Results

PSA can now create a bespoke data warehouse, using ingested data, 12x faster with WhereScape automation than they could with hand-coding.

After WhereScape had proved it’s worth in building and maintaining data warehouses, Steven discovered a new tool had been added since he last used the software. WhereScape 3D allows data architectures to be designed, prototyped and shown to business users before the build takes place, saving potentially weeks of work done in error.