Case Study
UST IQ enabled a multi-national publishing company to analyze 30 million records in 18 seconds
OUR CLIENT
The client is an American publishing company for educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. It is one of the “big three” academic publishers with over 40 offices across North America, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East and South America. It develops learning solutions for PreK–12, postgraduate and professional education in over 80 languages.
THE CHALLENGE
Covid-19 pandemic exposed supply chain bottlenecks
This global publishing company struggled to manage its sales forecast and supply chain during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because of lockdown restrictions, many book shipments were stranded at ports of entry in several countries. Business leaders wanted to implement a technology solution to understand book sales better and avoid similar choke points in the future. The company specifically wanted to understand the accuracy of its Salesforce data and use the insights to predict future demand.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Flexible in situ data exploration helped pinpoint a subset of key sales records
The IT team at the publishing house turned to UST IQ to analyze more than 30 million Salesforce records. Thanks to the easy-to-use Explorer interface, the IT team rapidly created complex queries to identify records that could accurately predict future sales. By using the explore, choose, load (XCL) functionality, the business analysts could evaluate and select specific data where it resides in the Salesforce application without expensive, time-consuming wholesale data extractions.
THE IMPACT
Rapid data analysis gave company leaders valuable insights in just four weeks
The robust UST IQ analytics solution gave the global publishing company the data processing, curation, and analysis functionality needed to examine massive amounts of Salesforce records. The project team could analyze 30 million records in just 18 seconds, which allowed the team to create an executive report for senior management—in just four weeks—with recommendations to optimize the company’s supply chain.