Accelerating Impact Analysis: From Weeks to Minutes

Daktronics, an American manufacturer of electronic LED displays, like so many enterprise organizations today, had approximately 10 different systems processing data. With different teams responsible for different systems, there were inconsistent metadata descriptions for the same data, which made it very difficult to accurately navigate their business landscape.

Daktronics’ data team reached out to Octopai just as they were about to change some of the source fields in various ETL processes within their data environment. Before moving forward with the changes, they needed to be able to understand the full impact of such changes across their multiple systems.

Any changes in the source field loading or calculation would impact a number of reports and tables across the environment, and therefore they would need to find each and every single report and table impacted by the change of the source field in order to conduct impact analysis prior to making any changes. They needed to be able to see what would be impacted by any change they were planning on making – in advance.

Octopai enables them to discover every single location of every single report and table impacted by the change throughout the multi-vendor data environment in seconds. Analysts now have the ability to reverse engineer all the data in a report and understand impact analysis instantly, which saves the company significant time and resources that were previously spent manually tracing the data flow. 

Getting Octopai up and running was quick and painless The onboarding process consisted of a one-hour metadata extraction and one-hour training session, after which the Daktronics team received the link to the platform and began customizing it to meet their needs.

Before using Octopai the Daktronics’ impact analysis was nowhere near error-proof. They would spend days and sometimes even weeks manually tracing the data flow in order to figure out how planned changes would affect certain reports and tables, but even with all that time spent, there were still slip-ups and reports they missed in their mapping. Manual impact analysis was simply not accurate.

Octopai saved Daktronics countless hours of time as it replaced this manual process with automation. They no longer have to use a homegrown report tracker service or SQL Search to conduct impact analysis. They no longer have to dive into individual SSIS packages which was perhaps one of the tasks that took the most time – especially as only data developers could do this.

Projects like impact analysis that used to take analysts weeks or months to complete, now take them a few minutes with Octopai, and they can focus their efforts on actually drawing insights from the data instead of searching for it all day long.