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Newgistics is a leading provider of end-to-end commerce solutions for top retailers and brands. It helps online retailers navigate both the physical and digital sides of commerce with offerings that include digital commerce development, order fulfillment, deliveries, and returns.

On the deliveries and returns side of the business, maintaining a high level of service depends on the ability to efficiently and reliably store and analyze data from across Newgistics’ network. This data includes scans of parcels and containers at facilities nationwide, transportation data and “final mile” data from the U.S. Postal Service, a key Newgistics partner.

“Customers and partners send us data from every leg of our transportation network and it comes in various formats, some structured and some unstructured,” says Puru Agrawal, Vice President of Data Services for Newgistics.

Staying ahead of customer expectations for zero latencyAs Newgistics has grown, the amount of data it manages from retailers and transportation partners has expanded exponentially. To stay ahead of the business’s needs, Newgistics has been actively rearchitecting data away from siloed systems and consolidating it into a unified next generation data warehouse, designed to deliver a “single version of the truth” and enable better business decisions. “We were moving lots of data around and had reached the limits of traditional architectures with respect to scalability and flexibility for handling different data structures,” said Agrawal. “This created redundancy, data latency, and reliability concerns that had to be addressed in order to stay ahead of

evolving consumer expectations.”

“Consumers are starting to expect that they’ll be notified about their packages within a few seconds of key events. But with legacy architecture where data has to make its way through various intermediate systems, it can take hours,” explains Agrawal. “This limited our teams from fine-tuning our facility performance, our transportation network, and our delivery partners as effectively as we could if we had access to near-real-time data.” To derive more value from its data, Newgistics and its cloud-computing consultant 10th Magnitude determined that the optimal data warehouse architecture would include a data lake in the cloud where all data sources could be replicated. “We chose Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse for the ability to get cost-effective, quickly scalable storage and computer services,” says Agrawal. “It allowed us to efficiently set up data transformation routines that would run ‘micro-batch’ ETL processes where vast quantities of new data is processed every few minutes, then stored in a report- and analytics-friendly format in a logical data warehouse. It’s a simple architecture to use, but it dramatically reduces latency and complexity.”

Newgistics today still has 80 percent of its systems on-premise in two different datacenters in the United States. So, the challenge was to create a hybrid on-premises and cloud implementation using Microsoft Azure. “That’s where Talend comes in,” Agrawal says. “Our CIO is a fan of open- source technologies due to their ability to reduce cost, drive innovation through open community participation, and put the focus back on customer service.”

Tracking parcel delivery from device to doorstep

“Data allows hyper-reliable shipping. Smart returns drive ROI and create exceptional customer experiences.

CA S E S T U DY

INDUSTRY

• Logistics/Transportation

INFORMATION• HQ: USA

• 501-1,000 employees

USE CASE• Customer experience

CHALLENGE• Latency in consumer-facing data

TALEND PRODUCT USED • Talend Big Data

PARTNER • 10th Magnitude

RESULTS • Data latency from 4 to 8 hours to 15 minutes

• Moving to an average 15-minute SLA end of 2017 to a 1 minute SLA by 2019

”Puru Agrawal, Vice President of Data Services, Newgistics.

Why Talend?“Right now,” says Agrawal, “we’re using Talend to replicate our multi-terabyte, on-premises legacy data into a Microsoft Azure Blob Storage data lake. And we’re using Talend in the cloud to transform slices of that legacy data into a Microsoft Azure SQL data warehouse that’s driving new analytical capabilities and transforming the way the company makes decisions.”

“Another aspect of Talend we really liked is their Big Data offering on top of their

data management capabilities,” he says. “Newgistics is making the transition now from more traditional relational data into MongoDB, Apache HBase, and Hadoop. We feel that Talend has many core capabilities that will allow us to grow incrementally and move us down that Big Data path.”

Agrawal adds: “Talend also provides a much more developer-friendly interface for writing routines than other solutions we have used. Developers who are familiar with Java, and even our team, which typically has a C# background, has been able to very quickly come up to speed on Talend and in the Talend Studio.”

Newgistics also preferred Talend’s licensing model, where the company can pay for its developers to create capabilities, then can deploy and scale those capabilities to an unlimited extent in production environments.

According to Agrawal, leveraging Talend and Microsoft Azure to create a cloud data lake has been a key enabler in developing innovative new offerings for Newgistics’ customers. “We help online retailers transform four key areas of their business deliveries, returns, fulfillment, and e-commerce - and there’s a significant opportunity to analyze and mine the data from all these activities so we can create a value proposition greater than the sum of its parts.”

Improved package tracking and enhanced visibility into business operationsThis new architecture powers the package tracking solution for consumers and significantly reduces data latency. “We’ve already improved from hours of latency with the old architecture and are approaching our goal of 15 minutes of data latency this year for package tracking,” he says. “Consequently, in our SLAs with customers, we’re comfortable guaranteeing a significantly higher level of performance than before, and we expect to improve it further in the next two years.”

By the end of 2017, Newgistics expects to meet its commitment to an average 15-minute SLA for delivery of all package tracking data, and for the most critical data, the company will deliver on a five-minute SLA. By 2019, that will become a one-minute SLA.

Top retailers and brands will be able to see data much faster and more reliably, and leverage the data in ways that may have previously been impossible. For example, data from Newgistics could help identify consumers with a proclivity for returns and allow a retailer to take appropriate action proactively. Real-time data could also be very useful while an order is being placed by providing up-to-date information about issues that might exist in the transportation network. This could allow a retailer to pick an alternative shipment option to avoid potential issues and proactively ensure customer satisfaction.

Finally, Agrawal says the new architecture also enables Newgistics’ business units to run their divisions more efficiently.

“Costs go down. Service levels go up, we can handle larger volumes, and packages get delivered faster - all to the delight of our customers. And that’s our top priority.”

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