Case Study
Modern Milkman
Speed to insight
50% reduction in time from ingestion source to analytics output with self-serve reports.
Savings of at least £70,000 per year on Data Engineering resources.
Up-skilling of 4 junior analysts to maintain ELT workload, improving employee satisfaction and retention.
About
The Modern Milkman is a milk and fresh goods delivery service, with a sustainable mission. They are passionate about reducing plastic waste and deliver milk and other goods using reusable glass bottles and boxes, working directly with independent farmers and suppliers. So far, they have saved over 45,000,000 plastic bottles – and counting!
The Modern Milkman has scaled rapidly, they quickly realized their external consultants providing data visualization was not fit for purpose long term. The Modern Milkman developed a new data strategy using Kleene, to access their data and utilize it to build a data first business.
I found Kleene and it was a bit of a godsend – exactly what I was looking for. It’s a great tool and more people should be using it. By working on building it yourself, you’re not saving money, you’re spending time, and it’s diminishing returns. We first went down the consultancy route and had dashboards built directly from our transactional database, but soon realized that visualization wasn’t the answer in a scaling business – within three months, they were redundant as our metrics had evolved. If we hadn’t been on top of data or been willing to invest in data, we wouldn’t be in the position we’re in now. People, particularly investors, are receptive to data.
John Hughes – Chief Information Officer Modern Milkman
The Challenge
Creating a single version of the truth
Various sources of siloed data
The Modern Milkman had many different sources of siloed data, requiring manual extraction and management to extract value. This meant gaining valuable information was a long and manual task, therefore costly and open to human error.
Limited time and resources
The Modern Milkman, like many organizations, were extremely limited in time and resources. They understood the data project was the first priority, but resources such as a data engineering team were costly. Prior to kleene, The Modern Milkman team would spend hours in spreadsheets and SQL servers.
Lack of granular data to drive business decisions
The executive team at the Modern Milkman did not have reliable, automated, granular data to gain insight on the organization as a whole. This made it difficult to make the best informed business decisions based on data.
Various sources of siloed data
The Modern Milkman had many different sources of siloed data, requiring manual extraction and management to extract value. This meant gaining valuable information was a long and manual task, therefore costly and open to human error.
Limited time and resources
The Modern Milkman, like many organizations, were extremely limited in time and resources. They understood the data project was the first priority, but resources such as a data engineering team were costly. Prior to kleene, The Modern Milkman team would spend hours in spreadsheets and SQL servers.
Lack of granular data to drive business decisions
The executive team at the Modern Milkman did not have reliable, automated, granular data to gain insight on the organization as a whole. This made it difficult to make the best informed business decisions based on data.
The Solution
Kleene managed the migration of the Modern Milkman data to a cloud data warehouse with the adoption of an all in one ELT tool. Kleene eliminated the manual processes the Modern Milkman were undertaking, whilst streamlining and automating the work of the external consultant, gaining access to insight with Kleene.
The Results
Creation of a data driven organization
Kleene has enabled data to be at the forefront of all decision making at The Modern Milkman. With a strong belief in data democratization and a desire to prevent data silos, The Modern Milkman chose Kleene as part of their data stack to gain insight and evolve the business. The data surfaced through Kleene empowers the team to answer crucial questions and make decisions informed by data.
“Data doesn’t usually permeate the C suite, yet it should. For us to build a business that was going to work, we had to invest in data. We’re breaking the data glass ceiling – as a result of Kleene, we’re in a position with our data where everyone can be an analyst, no matter their role in the business.”
“Data doesn’t usually permeate the C suite, yet it should. For us to build a business that was going to work, we had to invest in data. We’re breaking the data glass ceiling – as a result of Kleene, we’re in a position with our data where everyone can be an analyst, no matter their role in the business.”
Gaining time and freeing resources
The Modern Milkman were looking to build a data infrastructure that allowed them to access the insight they needed in order to drive value in the business, without spending hours in spreadsheets and SQL servers or building pipelines. With limited resources, hiring an engineer wasn’t possible, so they required a tool to bridge the gap.
“As CIO, I wanted to be in data all the time, but you still have to have time to do other things. Looking at other ELT tools, I could see that they weren’t going to save me any time. I would have spent time patching over them, as they’re tools for engineers, not analysts and we weren’t at the stage of hiring engineers. We couldn’t have developed our metrics, or cohorts, or got Snowflake shares to VCs, if I was spending all my time in different tools just to access the data.”
“As CIO, I wanted to be in data all the time, but you still have to have time to do other things. Looking at other ELT tools, I could see that they weren’t going to save me any time. I would have spent time patching over them, as they’re tools for engineers, not analysts and we weren’t at the stage of hiring engineers. We couldn’t have developed our metrics, or cohorts, or got Snowflake shares to VCs, if I was spending all my time in different tools just to access the data.”
Speed to insight
The Modern Milkman required speed to insight from their cohorts, for both board level meetings and investor reporting. Computing cohorts from a SQL Server required five different views to run sequentially and took over an hour to complete, resulting in dated data. By introducing Kleene + Snowflake, running a cohort takes 5 seconds, rather than an hour.
“The volume of customers on the platform meant that exercises to see meaningful data could only be run once a day with our previous data infrastructure. Getting hold of fresh data quickly and simply, that’s fresh and up to date is vital. In a scale up, the metrics are ever changing.”
“The volume of customers on the platform meant that exercises to see meaningful data could only be run once a day with our previous data infrastructure. Getting hold of fresh data quickly and simply, that’s fresh and up to date is vital. In a scale up, the metrics are ever changing.”
Evolving data to understand the business
Kleene data provided the executive level management granular data across key business functions. For example, the CFO required this granular data to build more accurate forecasts, whilst automating the previously manual workload. The CIO is now able to bifurcate data to understand the value of different channels, the true cost of customer contact, predictive modeling and product development roadmaps.
“I want to evolve data all the time. In order to do so, you need to have all of your data in one accessible place. By doing so, we can uncover where the pain points are and share that data with the teams across the business – customer success, product managers and marketing can then utilize that data.”
“I want to evolve data all the time. In order to do so, you need to have all of your data in one accessible place. By doing so, we can uncover where the pain points are and share that data with the teams across the business – customer success, product managers and marketing can then utilize that data.”
Easy data management to power your business
Connect, transform and visualise your data fast and in a scalable way
4.4 out of 5 stars on g2.com
Used by incredible data-driven companies
