Azure Data platform for Nutreco

Nutreco, an internationally operating animal feed producer, has the desire to respond more quickly to the changes in the market. Their customers are asking for higher yields and at the same time a lower use of antibiotics and a better balance in the use of raw materials taking into account food scarcity. To address this, Nutreco is pushing for a rapidly growing use of data, analyses and algorithms. In addition, customers of this company want to use more and more data about the products in the optimization of their own processes.  

Timeliness, accuracy, availability and reliability of data is the foundation on which these new digital products are built.  

Nutreco initiated a data strategy with the aim of getting more value from the data and the knowledge that is present in its own organization and external data sources. This data strategy resulted in the need for a data ecosystem consisting of data use cases, data governance and data policy that can guarantee the quality of data. They implement this strategy by realizing a data platform and data products. This realization is done in collaboration with internal data analysts and external data consumers throughout the value chain. A reliable data platform, a uniform use of master data management, reliable service levels and high-quality datasets in this data platform are essential for the value of these data products.

Therefore, Nutreco asked the AMIS Conclusion team to support them in designing and implementing the data platform and to increase the quality, speed, timeliness and availability of the data. In order to improve the use of data throughout the company. To this end, AMIS Conclusion created a data platform using Azure PaaS components. The data platform provides a generic data processing tool that is used to serve all business units in harvesting, processing, enriching, and publishing actionable datasets for their users. In addition, the platform enables the animal feed producer to quickly deliver new data products.

1. Data is fundamental to enabling effective and efficient innovation. In this we offer data discovery (what data is there?) and data sharing (how do I use the data easily?).  This accelerates the unlocking of the available knowledge and enables the entire organization to become data-driven.   

Below you will find some practical results of this data platform. The Platform: 

1. Provides a solid digital foundation for data-related products and services. The platform offers support to data users and data engineers. The platform makes it easier for the company to apply analytics and algorithms without the overhead of access and processing. 
2. Provides simple and transparent access to data.  
3. Enables the user to deliver large-scale datasets to the entire organization without the overhead of data extraction and data cleaning.  
4. Ensures availability and timeliness of data for the entire organization.  
5. Provides data from a variety of domains and sources. 
6. Enables employees who rely on reliable data sets to perform their analysis and make decisions with their algorithms, analytics tools, and applications that create insights and predictions. 
7. Provides availability and discoverability of reliable and high-quality data to data analysts.  
8. Provides the ability to scale the platform up or down based on demand.

The data platform is built with Microsoft Azure PaaS and SaaS components. We designed a solution that is suitable for incremental extraction, loading, and transformation (ELT) of source data.

The solution uses Azure Data Factory (ADF) to automate the multiple ELT pipelines. Using pre-built ADF connectors, we connect many different sources such as ERP and CRM systems; relational and NoSQL databases and Sharepoint. The resulting raw dataset is stored in Azure Data Lake.

The next stage in the pipeline runs automatically to clean, filter, enrich, and transform the data. This is largely done in Python and is done from ADF in Azure Databricks. The resulting rich data is written to Azure Data Lake. Databricks is a leading, cloud-based data engineering tool used for processing and transforming massive amounts of data and exploring the data through machine learning models.

When all transformations are complete, data is retained in the user tier.  Here, users and/or applications have fine-grained access to data that they are allowed to see. Users can search for and learn about data assets in the data catalog with details such as attribute definitions and dependencies, data lineage and quality, ownership, and sensitivity of data assets.

With this platform, data users have access to a wide range of (master) datasets that were previously difficult to obtain. Data scientists can now take advantage of regularly updated datasets to use in their business intelligence, advanced analytics or machine learning models. The available datasets are not limited to internal financial data only, but may also include operational, production, logistics, sales, and inventory data. And external data sources such as IoT sensor data.

The data platform has a wide variety of stakeholders within Nutreco. The data comes from many different sources. This made standardization of the sources and master data a challenge. The data requirements were still changing during the development of the platform. This made the project complicated. Using an agile and iterative approach, AMIS Conclusion is able to demonstrate progress in all areas and deliver tangible results within the first few months. This result and progress supported the organization's confidence in the platform and gradually increased the number of datasets in the platform.

AMIS Conclusion designed and implemented the data platform using the latest best practices and design principles for cloud-based data platforms. Implementing a platform as code made the implementation and promotion of new changes extremely reliable and robust.

AMIS Conclusion makes a distinctive difference in realizing the data market and the data platform by deploying engineers who can see the added value and use cases on top of this platform. This makes everyone who works on the platform excited to get business value out of the datasets as quickly as possible. Having this mindset is also very supportive in making the right architecture decisions and staying focused on adding value to use cases as much as possible. This way of working made the team very productive and flexible in following new use cases and user requirements.