Heel is an international pharmaceutical company specializing in medicines made from natural ingredients. Founded in 1936, its headquarters and manufacturing plant are located in Baden-Baden, Germany. In Russia, the company is represented by Heel Rus LLC.
The company stored a large amount of data with a contractor who provided an MS SQL-based analytical warehouse as a service. This situation had a number of significant drawbacks, including potential security and privacy risks.So, Heel Rus decided to migrate all data from the contractor's infrastructure to its on-premises infrastructure. Since this involved business-critical data (daily sales reports, which employees regularly access), the migration had to be as seamless and painless as possible for system users.
It was with this requirement that the client turned to ICL Services for expertise.
Key Challenges
- Deploy an infrastructure similar to the current one and restore backups.
- Verify the operation, accuracy, and completeness of the transferred data.
- Integrate the system with Power BI.
- Create copies of dashboards with the source replaced with local data and compare with the current implementation.
- Configure update schedules, test, and compare dashboards on the new data.
- Conduct a test period during which two sets of dashboards will operate in parallel.
Implemented our solution
- Project Introduction
Since speed and seamless user experience were the primary priorities during the migration, an audit of the current contractor's infrastructure was conducted before the project began, and agreements were reached regarding the transfer of existing documentation and backups, access to the current infrastructure, and consulting support from the developers.
Project Progress
The project began with the complete duplication of the current contractor's infrastructure within the client's infrastructure. Difficulties arose even at this stage, including lengthy backup provisioning, lack of remote access, a complete lack of documentation for the current solution, and minimal support from the current contractor.
The situation was exacerbated by numerous historical layers, incorrect architectural solutions, and the use of different approaches to working with data. These issues significantly slowed and complicated the work, as the primary objective was not to redesign the storage, but to migrate it "as is."
But the most challenging component to migrate was the existing OLAP cube containing a multidimensional data model for plans and sales. Due to the complete lack of documentation, it was extremely difficult to ensure stable operation and high-quality metric calculations
.
The correct approach would have been a complete rebuild, including analytics, descriptions, and deletion of unused metrics. However, this would have stretched the migration process over several months and increased the project's cost several times over. Therefore, as part of the migration, a copy of the OLAP cube was deployed with minimal changes to stabilize it.
After the data migration, copies of the PowerBI dashboards were created on the customer's infrastructure, with the new data sources defined, for full testing by business users.
The transition was carried out in stages: for some time, the customer operated both the cloud and the new on-premises solution simultaneously. Several challenges arose during the test phase, ranging from organizing transparent role-based user access to identifying the need for increased hardware resources. However, all issues were resolved, and users noted a significant improvement in the performance of the PowerBI dashboards.
Project outcome
After successfully completing the trial period, the customer decided to switch from their current provider and remain on-premises.
All the issues and peculiarities identified during the migration formed the basis for a gradual storage modernization plan, from creating its description and removing historical overlays to redesigning and standardizing the solution's core components.
Products and technologies
- Microsoft Excel, Microsoft SQL Server
- Power BI
Results
- Today, Heel Rus' critical data is fully protected, and the company no longer relies on external contractors.
- ICL Services experts seamlessly migrated the company's analytical data warehouse, significantly improving the user experience and enabling further development of the company's data infrastructure.
- The company's on-premises infrastructure is functioning correctly and without any issues, and all data has been migrated from the contractor and integrated with Power BI.