Introduction
Vodafone Netherlands is part of Vodafone Group and supports millions of customers through mobile and fixed services. To run the business reliably, the BI Competence Center (BICC) needed faster, cheaper, more repeatable data integration and reporting across a large Teradata enterprise data warehouse estate.
Pre-WhereScape Challenges
- High ETL cost: expensive, complicated ETL development slowed delivery and increased run costs.
- Slow change delivery: integrating a core system took 9 months and still produced unusable reports.
- Poor data quality: defects and rework consumed teams, while freshness and trust suffered.
- Long processing windows: day runs took 14 to 16 hours, limiting parallelism and agility.
- Hard-to-scale approach: heavy Unix/SAN transformations constrained performance and iteration speed.
Why WhereScape?
Vodafone Netherlands wanted to stop treating integration as bespoke, hand-crafted work. WhereScape RED fit because it enabled a metadata-driven approach: generate repeatable ELT patterns, push transformations down into Teradata, and industrialize Data Vault 2.0 delivery with automation, documentation, lineage, and impact analysis built in.
“With WhereScape load times have been reduced by 90 percent.”
– Ronald Seinen, BI Architect, BICC Strategy & Architecture, Vodafone Netherlands
The Solution
Push Down ELT to Teradata
Vodafone moved transformations out of Unix/SAN style processing and into Teradata, using WhereScape ELT patterns to exploit the platform’s native scale, parallelism, and performance.
Generate Data Vault 2.0
WhereScape RED was used to generate Data Vault 2.0 code, accelerating delivery of hubs, links, satellites, and repeatable load patterns, while also supporting parallel loading and a more resilient enterprise model.
Standardize With Templates
Vodafone worked with WhereScape to develop templates so standardized scripts could be generated automatically, improving consistency, accelerating development, and reducing the risk that teams drift from agreed standards.
Run Agile, Fail-Fast Initiatives
Instead of waiting months for a perfect enterprise model, Vodafone exposed new sources quickly via an information mart, collected feedback, then reverted to generate the best possible Data Vault structures for long-term scalability.
Bake In Lineage and Documentation
Every action in WhereScape was captured in a metadata repository, enabling automated documentation, lineage, and impact analysis to support governance and traceability across the warehouse lifecycle.
Results
🚀 Faster Time to Market
- Initiatives now complete in a few days, not six months.
- New sources reach business users early, improving requirement clarity.
- Faster feedback cycles reduced wasted build effort.
🚀 90% Faster Processing
- Day-run processing dropped from 14 to 16 hours to about 10% of that time.
- Parallel loading improved throughput and reduced bottlenecks.
- Faster runs improved freshness and operational confidence.
🚀 Lower Cost and Complexity
- Started decommissioning the prior ETL solution after high cost and poor outcomes.
- Reduced reliance on outsourcing through automation-driven delivery.
- Standardized generated code lowered maintenance overhead.
“The results Vodafone Netherlands has achieved using WhereScape RED has brought our BICC to the next level.”
– Jos Driessen, Manager, BICC Strategy & Architecture, Vodafone Netherlands
From “Projects” to “Initiatives”
A key organizational shift was language and operating model. Vodafone stopped framing work as long, linear projects and instead delivered smaller “initiatives” with rapid iteration. That change mattered because it aligned delivery cadence with how the business actually discovers requirements.
Building a Data Quality “Alternative Route”
Vodafone used WhereScape RED to create alternative feeds from core systems into the Teradata warehouse using ELT. This let the team detect data quality issues, keep reports running, and avoid doubling down on a complicated ETL path while waiting for upstream fixes.
Process Visibility at the Individual Level
Where core systems changed and process data was fragmented, Vodafone used WhereScape to gather process information and surface issues such as orders getting stuck. That kind of operational insight is difficult to sustain when integration logic is scattered across hand-coded pipelines.
Next Steps: Hadoop With Lineage
Vodafone’s future direction included leveraging Hadoop and using WhereScape RED to generate code that pushes into Hadoop, while maintaining lineage end-to-end. The intent was to expand big data integration without sacrificing traceability.
“Using WhereScape RED and an agile / fail fast approach, our business participates in ‘initiatives’ to calibrate our end results. We can deliver first results in just a few days.”
– Ronald Seinen, BI Architect, BICC Strategy & Architecture, Vodafone Netherlands
